iPod Banned Due To Cheating
04.27.07 - 01:39pm
It used to be in school that kids would write test answers on the bottom of their shoes or under a baseball cap’s flap, but now even cheating is taking advantage of technology.
The iPod is a perfect way for kids to cheat - you can simply download answers into a podcast, hide them in song lyrics, record them with a voice recorder and then all you need is to tuck the little white earbud under your collar and play away.
Kids have been using the little music player for a while but as Shana Kemp, spokeswoman for the National Association of Secondary School Principals says sometimes it takes awhile for teachers and administrators, who come from an older generation, to catch on to the various ways the technology can be used. But now that they have, it is likely that iPods will be banned during all tests, something already done with cell phones.
“I think it is becoming a national trend,” said Kemp. “We hope that each district will have a policy in place for technology — it keeps a lot of the problems down.”
However while some schools are banning the devices others are using it to learn. Duke University in North Carolina has provided the iPods for students for the last three years as part of a learning experiment.
Tim Dodd, executive director of The Center for Academic Integrity at Duke says that the iPods have proved invaluable for courses such as music, engineering and sociology. Dodd say that cheating has gone down over the past 10 years, mainly because the community expects academic integrity.
“Trying to fight the technology without a dialogue on values and expectations is a losing battle,” Dodd said. “I think there’s kind of a backdoor benefit here. As teachers are thinking about how technology has corrupted, they’re also thinking about ways it can be used productively.”
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