Products
Product: Turnitin
6/1/2011 By:
turnitin.com ¦ Retail price: approximately $2 per student per year
By MaryAnn Karre
“Turnitin is a collaborative online solution
for managing writing assignments and
delivering multifaceted, rich feedback to
students on written work.”
—www.iparadigms.com, May 1, 2011
Quality and Effectiveness: Most
teachers know Turnitin as a plagiarism
checker, and it still checks submitted
papers against 14 billion Web pages,
150 million other student papers, and an
impressive collection of leading library
resources. Although it has been known to
generate false negatives, such as properly
cited segments, as well as overlook
instances of plagiarism, the latest version
allows a teacher to see matched sources
from the paper three ways, to see all the
text of a matching source, and to navigate
across matches for that source. This
enables the teacher to see which sources
were used most often, which other sources also match
within a certain section, and all sources that were used.
In addition to ensuring originality, though, Turnitin now
makes editing and sharing content easier by facilitating
teacher and peer review as well as paperless grading.
Students become more involved in the process, as they can
comment on other students’ work, under their own names
or anonymously. Teachers can supply rubrics and standard
or customized assessment questions to keep peer reviews
on track and to direct the commentary.
Ease of Use: Turnitin is logical and easy to understand.
When a paper is checked for plagiarism, color-coded and
numbered sources in the right panel correspond to what
the tool is flagging as the paper’s nonoriginal text, which is
displayed in the main window. It is then up to the teacher
to decide if the colored text was copied, and if so to bring
this to the student’s attention. Grading and teacher commentary
have been simplified with standard and custom
comments that teachers can drag directly onto the paper,
and teachers can easily create a QuickMark comment and
save it for reuse. Comments in GradeMark are now easier to
edit and more legible, and highlighting is simpler and more
logical as well.
Creative Use of Technology: Turnitin is completely
Internet based, so students can hand in papers anytime,
anywhere, and teachers can share papers with other students
without printing them. Assignment, discussion, and
grading take place online, saving thousands of trees and
ensuring that papers are not misplaced. Teachers can provide
valuable feedback to students through editorial highlighting,
custom comments, and making QuickMark editing
marks directly on the students’ papers. Papers can now also
be downloaded and printed as PDFs with or without the
data from the OriginalityCheck and GradeMark.
Suitability for Use in a School Environment:
Because it now has collaborative tools, Turnitin becomes
more of a teaching tool than a trap for plagiarists. Students
can learn to edit, revise, and correct citations with the help
of suggestions from teachers and peers.
Top Features
¦ Turnitin can help teachers give students
the guidance they need to revise
and edit properly and use sources
appropriately.
¦ Since it is entirely Web based, Turnitin
enables students and teachers to
become a learning community, sharing
discussion, review, and assessment 24/7
within the classroom and outside it.