Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

If you are a teacher interested in checking your students’ work for copied material, you can use the list below where you can find the Top 10 FREE Plagiarism Detection Tools for Teachers.

With this boom in digital technology, plagiarism  has been elevated to the ranks of serious epidemics. In academia it gets even worse. More students are growing dependent on copy paste culture. Entire theses and dissertations have been plagiarized and stories of scholars loosing their academic integrity abound. However, teachers and educators being plagiarizers is another story, one that needs much more in-depth analysis than what this short post can afford. Instead I want to help those of you who have issues with plagiarism in their classrooms. If technology has brought about a surfeit in scholarly plagiarism, it also has tools to help you fight it. Here is an updated list of some wonderful web tools to use to detect plagiarism in your students essays and other pieces of writings. Enjoy

Plagiarism is a growing problem for universities, many of which are turning to software detection for help in detecting and dealing with it. This paper explores issues around plagiarism and reports on a study of the use of Turnitin in a new university. The purpose of the study was to inform the senior management team about the plagiarism policy and the use of Turnitin. The study found that staff and students largely understood the university’s policy and Turnitin’s place within it, and were very supportive of the use of Turnitin in originality checking. Students who had not used Turnitin were generally keen to do so. The recommendation to the senior management team, which was implemented, was that the use of Turnitin for originality checking should be made compulsory where possible – at the time of the study the use of Turnitin was at the discretion of programme directors. A further aim of the study was to contribute to the sector’s body of knowledge. Prevention of plagiarism through education is a theme identified by Badge and Scott (2009) who conclude an area lacking in research is “investigation of the impact of these tools on staff teaching practices”. Although a number of recent studies have considered educational use of Turnitin they focus on individual programmes or subject areas rather than institutions as a whole and the relationship with policy.