But I Spent Hours on It!

Here’s another factoid that is good for teachers to have at their fingertips -  did you know that Microsoft Word has a little-known feature called total editing time?  This is a good way to monitor how long kids are spending on a writing assignment and it works like this: when you start working on a new Word document, a timer starts, and once you save the document, the time consumed thus far is saved as the ‘total editing time’. You continue to work on the document, and save it again, and the time elapsed since the last save is added to the total editing time or how long a kid has spent on an assignment.  Now, when a student says “but I spent hours on this,” it can easily be verified.

Online Plagiarism Checker

WriteCheck, by Turnitin, is a great way to help your students avoid plagiarism. Using WriteCheck, student papers are scanned for plagiarism against over 200 million student papers, 90,000 publications, and over 20 billion Web pages. Once they submit a paper, they’ll usually get their results within five minutes, but not longer than ten to fifteen minutes. The results also include a check for grammar, style, and spelling errors.  Papers are returned in their original form, which allows students to better understand what changes need to be made.

Fees for the service run from $6.95 for a one paper credit (papers 5000 words or less); $24.95 for five paper credits, and $59.95 for twenty paper credits. With each paper credit comes three resubmissions per document.

Using a Plagiarism Prevention Service

If your school uses a plagiarism prevention service, such as Turnitin or Safe Assign, you may want to think about whether you want the service to assist you in grading papers or if you want it to assist students in learning how to write papers. Do you want the service to serve as your own private detection center or do you want the service to show students what parts of their work may not be original and/or may not be cited properly? Plagiarism prevention services suggest that you use them as a learning tool for students and teaching tool for you.

Ten Types of Plagiarism

Turnitin surveyed 879 instructors in high schools and colleges to learn what types of plagiarism teachers frequently found in student writing.  The result of the survey was the white paper, Plagiarism Spectrum, which summarizes the types of plagiarism and gives them clever titles. These titles may help your students to be more careful in their writing. You can find out more about this paper at the Turnitin site. In the meantime, see how many of these types of plagiarism that you can figure out: Clone, CTRL-C, Find-Replace, Remix, Recycle, Hybrid, Mash-Up, 404 Error, Aggregator, and Re-Tweet.

Don’t Copy That 2

The Education Division of the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) has a new web site aimed at helping educate K-12 students about the ethical and legal use of copyrighted materials, such as software, books, articles, music and movies. Called Don't Copy That 2,  it includes a hip rap music video that addresses the dangers of engaging in piracy and the importance of respecting the creative output of others.   Aimed at teachers, it can also be helpful for parents concerned about the issue. Support materials for the video, lesson plans for middle and high school teachers, a glossary, and other resources can be very helpful in confronting these complex and important concepts.  

Does Plagiarism-Detection Software Work?

In a survey of twenty-six programs to detect plagiarism, only a few were reported to be “partially useful”.  Some of these-type programs may even be “paper mills”, which although they seem to be checking for plagiarism, are instead collecting papers and reselling them. The German researchers who did the survey warn us that plagiarism-detection software is only a tool, not the complete answer to our woes of trying to determine if students copied from other sources. They call for better education to help students understand how to avoid plagiarism and to use the programs for pointing out what may be copied so that students can edit their work. The systems called “partially useful” were: TurnItIn, PlagAware, Ephorus, PlagScan, and Urkund.

Shows Students How to Avoid Plagiarism

Our job is to teach students how to avoid plagiarism, not especially to catch them after they submit a less than acceptable papers. PaperToolsPro is a writing and research management program designed to help both students and professional writers with their work. With it, users can collect notes, organize content, move information to a word processor, and create bibliographies and citations such as MLA and APA. The program includes resources designed to help teachers help students avoid plagiarism, understand research paper style and citation formats, and evaluate sources. If you are interested in learning more about PaperToolsPro, you’ll want to the watch videos that introduce the program, show how to use the program, and how to make notes into a draft. There’s also a detailed tour , as well as demo accounts. Individual subscriptions are $20 a year and school subscriptions are $200 plus $1 for each enrolled student. Other pricing options are available. Until 12/31/09, there’s a special—two teacher subscriptions for one price of one.

PaperToolsPro™

It’s Learning for Student Success

It’s Learning, a program that focuses upon individual students, is being used with almost 2 million students across Europe. Now available to schools in the United States, the program features ways to help schools with planning, engaging, learning, assessing, reflecting, and reporting. Integration of It’s Learning requires no local installation or maintenance; offers anywhere access, automatic updates so that everyone using it is on the same version, a secure learning environment, and lower costs. Besides all that, it’s said to be ready to be put to use in 24 hours. With the program, students can create personal learning blogs, ePortfolios, multimedia content, Web pages, collaborative projects, and much more. They can join courses from other schools, hold real-time discussions, collect data for surveys, keep personal calendars—you name it. There are an abundance of options for teachers and administrators as well, which include grade books, planning tools, online examinations, custom reports, accessibility support, international standards, and individualized learning plans. It’s impossible to describe all that It’s Learning does. If you are interested in this complete learning system, you’ll want to go to the site and take a look at the science demo. You can also request the US demo and additional information including a slideshow about the product.

Who's Supposed to Teach Kids about Property Rights?

According to a Microsoft survey, kids give parents, television programs, the Web, and newspapers more credit for informing them about property rights than teachers. Even so, only 11% of the students surveyed said they had a "clear" understanding of property rights.  The result of this survey is a new curriculum that's currently being testing by Microsoft. It's designed to target Grades 8-10 but can be modified for use by students in Grades 6-12. If you are interested in working with the testing of this curriculum or just getting copies of the free materials, you'll want to browse the Teacher's Guide to Intellectual Property Rights Education. Those who wish to be part of the testing can sign up for one of three levels of participation.