Referencing is necessary to ensure you do not plagiarise (copy) someone else's work. You cannot present the work of someone else's as your own. This applies to the writings, ideas, statistics, images and audio recordings of other people, whether it is published or unpublished. You can avoid plagiarism by citing your sources.
Try these excellent tutorials on how and why to reference:
Turnitin electronically checks student work for improper citation or potential plagiarism by comparing it against a worldwide text comparison database.
Creative Commons is a set of free licences for creators to use when making their work available to the public. It is the most common way that copyright owners release their materials under an open licence. All Creative Commons licences permit educational uses of a work, and teachers and students can freely copy, share and sometimes modify and remix a Creative Commons work without having to seek the permission of the creator.
When using Creative Commons licensed materials in your resources, remember to attribute the copyright owner as this is a requirement of every Creative Commons licence. If you are using Creative Commons licensed material in your resources, best practice attribution is TASL:
Some 'free for education' or open source material for images. Use this list to ensure you are respecting Intellectual Property and Copyright. Note: always double-check the terms before use
