Plagiarism

Plagiarism, I think that gets most teachers attention.  Before I discuss some software to help you out, you might want to look at sites that your students might use for essays or papers:

Academictermpapers.com
Researchpaper.com
Megaessays.com
Pinkmonkey.com
FreeEssayNetwork.com

You might want to discuss academic honesty and integrity with your students before major assignments.  Ted Frick from the University of Indiana has a online quiz for student to try.  It can be found by clicking here.  Another site for your students to look at  is http://plagiarism.org/ .  As I mentioned earlier there is software available that you can use to check for plagiarism.

Click here

Our board has had a license for this software for more than a few years as I have had a username and password for this for at least two years, if not more.  For some reason our board has never promoted this.
I received this from an English teacher at another school in our board about Turnitin.

"I am currently marking my first set of papers on turnitin.com, and let me tell you, it's amazing what that program can do! Besides checking for plagiarism, it also makes marking so much faster and easier. For example, I can just drag and drop commonly used comments onto a student's paper (so I don't have to keep writing the same thing over and over again). I can make up my own commonly used comments to drop in, I can type anywhere on the paper to add a comment, and I can even leave a voice comment at the end of the paper (if for some reason, I'd rather talk than type).

My students reported that it was very easy to set up an account and upload their papers. Plus, it tracks late submissions for you, it saves paper, and it stores old papers so students can't submit someone else's work next year! Why wouldn't you want to use this program?"

You must have your students submit an electronic copy of their work to use this.  This can be done through Edmodo (see my blog on Friday November 30) or you could just have them bring you their flash drive but if you would like to join this decade, try Edmodo.  If you'd like to start using Turnitin, e-mail Chris Knight through firstclass and ask him to set you up with a username and password.  If you need information on how to use Turnitin,  there are many training videos that you can find at http://turnitin.com/en_us/training/instructor-training  or you can sign up for a product walk through by going to http://pages.turnitin.com/walkthrough.html  If you might be interested in this product, take a look at the video below.