In-text referencing. Yawn.
Except, being the geek that I am, I'm actually quite excited this time around, because it's the first time I'll be teaching them how to do in-text citation electronically. In the same way I feel it's more important that the younger grades acquire the skills to be able to interrogate sources, these senior students need to become better writers, and I'd rather spend more time on this, than getting them to parrot-learn how to write up a citation.
Now, I'm not saying they shouldn't use these and they still have to gather all the information for their references; just that, if there's a quicker way of doing citations, then I've got more lesson time to teach them writing skills. Some of our students already use digital referencing, but are unsure when and where they should be doing this, and often pop them into their text willy nilly. They know WHY they should reference; only, they're unsure HOW this should be used within their text.
Most of our students use Microsoft Word or Google Docs for their assignments, so I'll be covering these. But before I even start with that, I'll be teaching them how to use quotes, indirect quotes and paraphrases correctly within their essays and research projects. And when they've got the hang of that, then I'll show them how easy it is - click, click! - to insert their citations.
We give lessons to our grade 10 and 11 learners about referencing and plagiarism. They have to use Harvard referencing at Bishops, so we teach them how to use (the very easy) Word referencing tool. It's slightly more complicated for those who use MacBooks, but it is still possible to use it. Some of them are surprisingly ignorant about plagiarism, so we push that by the senior grades, as UCT has commented that some of the private schools' learners do not reference properly, or plagiarise initially.
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