The dreaded phone picture of schoolwork. I see it every time I’m on lunch duty. Students are on their phone, copying work for various classes. Their friends send or email them pictures of their work. It’s one of the hardest types of cheating for the classroom teacher to catch. It’s not a Google Docs where sharing permissions or revision history can be checked.
Cheating has always happened, regardless of technology. Knowing how often students are sharing information with each other, and feeling the need to cheat in the first place, is so disappointing. It destroys everything we try to build as educators. It hurts our goals. It hurts our students. Still, this is happening on the daily basis in our schools.
I’ve removed the username of the above Twitter user, but there are plenty of students bragging online about how they cheat in school. Are the assignments students doing really this useless? Are the stakes really this high? Is there really so much to complete that students must resort to cheating?
Technology has brought plenty of ways to monitor students and work to prevent some of the same cheating it creates. But that should not be the end goal. There has to be a massive shift in what we believe about points, education and cheating for this to ever change.