TPS Instructional Technology Site

The Topeka Public Schools has a comprehensive digital citizenship curriculum, designed to empower students and staff to think critically, behave safely, and participate responsibly in our digital world. Our district uses two tools to accomplish this.

The first tool is the curriculum from Common Sense Education. It provides lesson plans, videos, student interactives, and assessments, to professional learning and family outreach materials. This turnkey Curriculum provides schools with everything they need to take a whole-community approach to digital citizenship. The lessons are divided into eight topics:

Self-Image and Identity
Relationships and Communication
Digital Footprint and Reputation
Cyberbullying and Digital Drama
Information Literacy
Internet Safety
Privacy and Security
Creative Credit and Copyright

The second tool is Google's new Be Internet Awesome curriculum. There is a section to train the teachers on how to use the materials and to demonstrate best practices. Teachers can earn a badge upon completion of the training course. Teachers can assign Interland to specific classes or sections by using the integrated Share to Classroom icon for Google Classroom.

The students' portion is comprised of a game format that is used after direct instruction to reinforce what they just learned. The curriculum is divided into five sections:

Be Internet Smart - Share With Care
Be Internet Alert - Don't Fall for Fake
Be Internet Strong - Secure Your Secrets
Be Internet Kind - It's Cool to be Kind
Be Internet Brave - When in Doubt, Talk it Out

The Google curriculum is based on ISTE Standards for Students, which is the backbone of the Topeka Public Schools technology standards.

Google Interland Be Internet Awesome Image

Documents/Websites:

Topeka Public School Digital Citizenship Standards

Common Sense Media

Google Be Internet Awesome

Parent/Family Resources

Lesson Plans

Plagiarism and Citing Sources

Plagiarism is a problem throughout the world and not unique to education. It happens when someone uses content (work or ideas)that belongs to another entity and passes it off as their own work. Plagiarism is essentially theft and fraud committed simultaneously. It is theft because the content is taken from a source without giving credit due to the author. It is also fraud because the content is passed off as the writer's own work. Plagiarism is always considered cheating and can also be illegal as it is a violation of copyright laws.

How can we spot plagiarism?

There are several ways to detect plagiarism.

Simply copy and paste blocks of written content into a Google Search box. Google will return matches with the words you submitted highlighted.
Google Classroom has an option called Originality Reports. On the free version teachers get to check one assignment per classroom.
If you use Grammarly, it has a plagiarism checker as part of the app. Teachers can enter text or upload a file to check for plagiarism or writing errors.

Citing Sources

Citing your sources is key to avoiding plagiarism in your work. This shows readers that the ideas and information you are presenting belong to someone else. If you have paraphrased or quoted and then cite the source, you are not committing plagiarism. So how do we cite a source? Below is a video from our friend, Richard Byrne at Free Technology for Teachers (www.freetech4teachers.com) and a link to his post - Citing Sources in Google Docs.