turnitin.com

**turnitin.com ** Turnitin.com is a useful tool for both teachers and students. Initially created by iParadigm in 1996 to check the originality of student-written papers, it now encompasses other areas of the writing process, such as a peer editing feature, and also allows teachers to grade students' work online. For teachers, it is a useful tool when checking the originality of student writing. When student work is submitted, it is searched against over 9 billion pages of web content, as well as over 10,000 subscription-based journals and periodicals. For students, the Peer Editing features allows students to read and comment on their peers' work.
 * __Overview__

__Features:__ **  = __Strengths__: =
 * Turnitin WriteCycle which includes plagiarism prevention, GradeMark digital grading, and Peer Review Collaboration and Feedback
 * Contains tools similar to course management systems such as an assignment library, calendar, discussion boards, and gradebook
 * Can be integrated with course management systems like Blackboard, WebCT, Moodle, and Sakai
 * Offers live technical support and training at no cost

 = __Weaknesses__: = = = = __Before using:__ = = = = = = __Best Practices__ = = = Best Practice #1 - Plagiarism Prevention Tired of wondering whether your students' work is original? Or worse, tired of trying to check online yourself to see if writing is plagiarized? With TurnItIn.com's plagiarism prevention, you can have your students create accounts at turnitin.com and submit their papers to the site. TurnItIn.com compares students' work against billions of web pages, as well as thousands of journals and periodicals. All you have to do is check out the Originality Report for a student's submission. And best of all, the Originality Report tells you the percentage match of your students' papers to the sources in its database.
 * Digital work flow that eliminates the "paper" of students' papers
 * Can be accessed anywhere with Internet access
 * Accepts most file types, such as Microsoft Word, Corel Word Perfect, HTML, Adobe PostScript, Plain Text (TXT), Rich Text Format (RTF), and PDF
 * Teachers can choose whether or not submissions can be made after the due date
 * The Originality Report helps you find sources that contain text similar to submitted papers, but you must do an in-depth examination of the sources and the submitted paper to determine whether or not the paper was plagiarized.
 * The Originality Report often flags direct quotations, even if they are cited correctly.
 * If a student's paper is matched with a student's paper from another district, you must submit a permission request to the instructor to view that student's paper.
 * Your school district must register for TurnItIn.com in order for teachers to use
 * If you are not manually adding students to the class, the students must self-enroll and must be given a class ID number and class enrollment password in order to add the class to their profile

Best Practice #2 - GradeMark Digital Grading One of the worst things about assigning written work is having to carry around a huge stack of papers as you struggle to grade them in a timely manner. Well, with TurnItIn.com's Digital Grading, you won't have to weigh down your bag with all of those papers! Using Digital Grading, teachers have access to a variety of grading tools, including:
 * comments - this feature is similar to the comments a teacher would write in the margins of the paper
 * inline comments - appears as type overlaid on the paper; allows the teacher to comment on a very specific part of the paper (for example, the thesis statement)
 * QuickMark symbols - commonly used editing marks that teachers use when grading papers; teachers can use editing marks already offered by TurnItin, create their own, or access marks used by other teachers
 * rubric scorecards - used to evaluate student work based on a certain set of criteria; teachers have the option to create and/or share rubrics
 * general comments - this feature allows the teacher to write a longer response that is less specific to a certain part of the paper

Best Practice #3 - Peer Review A great way to incorporate technology in the classroom is to have students peer review and peer edit their classmates' papers using the Peer Review feature. Using this feature, the teacher can add topic questions that focus the reviewer to specific parts of the writing process or add metric questions that ask students to rate the paper on a scale of 1 to 5. Teachers also have the option to write a review that supplements the peer reviews and read all the peer reviews that have been completed. This is a useful tool to not only teach students more about the writing process and how to respond to peer work, but also allow them to become more familiar with using technology. > > __ Bibliography __