There are some great Web resources you can review with your classes while in the lab or in a smart classroom. Unfortunately, most cases of plagiarism we see are a result of students carrying over secondary school ideas equating "composition" with cutting and pasting information from Web sources. Here are some common student myths:

• As long as I put a parenthetical citation at the end of a paragraph of borrowed material, I'm safe.
• If I change a few words in every sentence, I'm in the clear.
• I can string together several passages from other sources, as long as they're documented, and still consider what I'm writing to be "my paper."
• Teachers are too busy to check to see whether or not I am using someone else's work.
• As long as I don't know the rules, I can't be blamed if I do plagiarize.

Borrow some of the following exercises to help show them the difference between plagiarism and original composition.

Exposing Myths
One of the things that makes the forums, in general, so very useful is that it provides a space to open up conversations and discussions. You might start a discussion of plagiarism by having your class post to your class forum (or a cross-section forum) their understanding of what plagiarism is. You don't even have to intervene in this discussion, necessarily. Encourage students to post their own definition of plagiarism and then respond to one or two others. In the end, the class may reach a consensus of what plagiarism is by talking it out—without you needing to intervene.

Scenarios
Another way to use the forum to open up discussions of plagiarism is to post threads that describe "questionable" situations and then ask your class to reply to the threads and explain why each is or is not plagiarism. After all, most students understand that just buying a paper is plagiarism; what gives them trouble are situations that are less clear-cut. In this sense, a lot of the plagiarism that actually happens is wholly unintentional—students just don't understand that what they think is getting help or paraphrasing is actually plagiarism.

I think it's particularly useful to use something like the forums to have this discussion because there's already so much that has to be covered in the classroom that moving the discussion outside the classroom allows it to have the space and time that's needed while still giving you a chance to do what needs to be done in the classroom.