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.

Tracking Changes
I think there's always some concern about doing something like peer revision in the computer classroom. It's just so easy for one student to be making suggestions within another student's actual word processing file and then for that student to keep the changes—essentially plagiarizing. One way to side-step this (while also giving your students experience in the kinds of collaborative writing tools used in the business world) is to use the "track changes" feature of Word during any kind of peer revision. Granted, students could still simply merge the changes into their papers, but having the changes visually demarcated from their own text provides a clear boundary for them to respect.

This site has a good tutorial on how to use track changes. Check out the collaborative tools tutorial for Word. Students who are used to Word Perfect can simply have their files imported into Word.

Switching Programs, Gaining Literacy
Another way to make students aware of boundaries during peer revision is to force them to switch word processors during peer revision. That is, if a student's paper is in Word format, ask the peer reviewers to open it in Word Perfect, and vice-versa.

This switch has a few advantages. First off, it physically separates the original paper and the peer revision, which creates physical (well, OK, electronic) boundaries between their words and the suggestions from the peer reviewer. Second, it expands everyone's computer literacy by forcing them to deal with different programs (Word and Word Perfect)