Any tech tools, resources, recommendations, including the vast world of online learning.
Do you use plagiarism checkers to check the originality of your students works?
Plagiarism is so popular nowadays! It is easy to just copy paper work from Internet, some of my colleagues are using plagiarism detection tools, it is software that checks for uniqueness of the text. I was suggested to use free plagiarism checker Plagtracker.com (http://www.plagtracker.com/). I think it is important to know if student has written his essay for himself, or just has downloaded it from Internet to put him appropriate mark.
What do you think about such software? Do you use it? Does it helps you to prevent plagiarism among students?
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Hey Bernard, Good question -
Hey Bernard,
Good question - and an important one, I think, as it cuts to the heart of a major issue in education at this time. I think there is a real discussion going on about the value of 'content-based' essays and reports - when such content is so easily accessed via the internet.
So, to answer your question, in my own practice, I do two things:
a) Firstly, I try to set tasks in my class that are not the usual 'write a report on this or that'. These kinds of tasks are usually easily predicted and thus open to plagiarism.
b) I also use 'Turnitin' (turnitin.com) when I can't do the above. It's pretty good - and usually once someone is caught, they don't do it again!
Turnitin as a teaching tool
In my middle school classroom, I had a research paper unit. Near the end, I had students run their papers through Turnitin.com. If a students had copy and pasted a paragraph here or there, I was able to show the student why it was not their own work and how to make it right. There was very little large scale plagiarism since checked their progress several times a week.
Only twice did I have students skip all of the preliminary steps and turn in a paper copy and pasted from the internet. The color-coded Turnitin report made the parent meeting pretty straight-forward. It all ended well since both students did the whole five week project all over again the right way (with a penalty). The most important thing for me was that they learned the difference between their own work and copying someone else's, which is becoming more mirky these days.