Shutting of collaboration in a classroom teaching setting

[Ed]

With the release of Office 2003, collaboration is at its core of development. As a classroom teacher, it provides speed and the latest in technology for cheating. Is there a way to disable the email and collaboration functions within Office 2003? Is there a way to imbed student information into a document, where it cannot be change? Is there a free (school district budgets are tight) for tweaking these settings? We also want the ability to reestablish all of the functions to teach the collaboration component of Office 2003. Any help and/or suggestions will be appreciated. Thank you!

 

[Rob Schneider]

Can you please elaborate? What features of Office do you call
"collaboration"? The menu's under Tools in Word? Specifically, what
features do you want to stop?

I guess you could remove the PC's network connection, don't give LAN
User ID's, remove access to email, stop using Office (see below), etc.

I'm not sure this would stop cheating. Might slow it down, but if they
want/need to cheat, they will find ways.

I guess in a school environment a way would be to ensure that the morals
and legality of cheating be something that is part of the curriculum.
May well be one of the more important things the kids go away from
school with.

You could also stop using Office in the school environment. Use some
other way to teach "word processing" and "spreadsheets", e.g. something
like OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org) which given your tight budgets you
may appreciate knowing has high functionality, is high quality, and is free.

Hope this is useful to you. Let us know.

rms

 

[Ed]

We already are teaching about cheating and plagiarism along with having a District wide policy if a student violates it. With the easy of emailing and collaboration it is very difficult for a classroom teacher to supervise the 30 students to ensure all 30 are original documents. With a simple click on an icon or copy, opening an attachment, or copy and paste a student has the original document. Thank you for your response and input.

 

[Rob Schneider]

I've heard about, but do not know details, there is software for
educational organisatoins available that compares documents with
documents submitted currently and in past with other students, and also
using search engines like Google, can compare against internet-based
publications. If this is something that you need to enforce, then maybe
you should seek out this sort of software.

You are quite right to observe that it's quite easy to plagarize. I
don't think it it's any easier in today's world than it was before we
had computers other than more text to steal from is available. At the
same time it's easier to detect, with computers, the occurance of
plagiarism.

This reminds me of a recent episode involving the NY Times and Wall
Street Journal. I forget which way it was, but a reporter from one took
and article from other and minimally re-wrote it and published it
without attribution on their own site. Quickly detected by the
journalists who clearly read both their own and other's publications.

Hope this is useful to you. Let us know.

rms

 

[Ed]

We use Turnitin.com to check research papers, however, in a computer applications class where you have them all format the same report after typing it; it makes it very difficult to track the changes and the author due to everyone doing the same report. I guess if we could imbed in the document, the authors name and station, where it cannot be change, it may solve part of the problem.

 

[Rob Schneider]

First, learn how to "reply" to postings in a newsgroup. You are reply
to your own postings and not making a "thread". You are using the web
interface which is a hard to use and does not work. Use Outlook Express
or some other newsgroup reader. Simpler and easier.

You have all tools at your disposal. There is no way to impose the
control on the documents that you wish. Word and Office are tools for
authors. They are for making documents.

I suppose you could make rules about how the students should "publish"
their work in a format more appropriate for publishing. The world, for
reasons I don't understand, publishes "source code" of their writing in
Word Doc, Excel XLS, and PowerPoint PPT format. Not secure, invites
changes by others masquerading as the original author's work, author
loses control of content and format, etc. All bad.

Unfortunately, since the world does it this way, there are no magic
answers. However, perhaps you can require students to publish their
work in Adobe PDF format and there fix/store the information you seek.

The problem you are now reporting seems to be something different. I
don't really understand it.

Isn't the root cause cheating? I still don't think there is a technical
fix that will work to the extent you seek. It's a people problem.

Hope this is useful to you. Let us know.

rms