Alternate Uses for Existing Technology

As technology becomes more available to the classroom teacher we should be aware of alternative uses of existing applications. PowerPoint has been in the classroom for over a decade. It has been a means of combining icons and written documents for ease of display. However PowerPoint can be used for more than just that. PowerPoint can be helpful as an organizational tool for a high school course (ideally Language Arts).
After the students choose a topic have them search the internet for research (you may have to make sure that they know how to find a credible website or perhaps you could require a couple non-internet sources). When they find information they can copy and paste the whole portion into a PowerPoint document. As they are building the slides with this word for word information they should also be building a works cited page. The general rule for PowerPoint is to have limited notes for a more extensive speech. The next step for the students would be to cull the information into an outline of general ideas. Whether you would want them to present at this stage would be your choice.
What will be left over at this point is a rough outline for a paper to write. Since they no longer have the full quotes they can not plagiarize. All of their paper will have to be summary and synthesis of their sources and all sources would have to be cited directly or indirectly. This would be a good exercise not only for showing students how to outline a paper, but also a good exercise to train them on how to avoid plagiarizing. The activity is interactive and interesting to students who are used to working on computers.

Thanks to a coworker for the idea.