what I like about Turnitin.com

I'm not going to weigh in on the controversy over intellectual property. But I will say that I have used Turnitin for several semesters and I like it, and not really for plagiarism detection. Here's how I use it.

Plagiarism deterrent: I think that Turnitin works better as a plagiarism deterrent than a detector. There are a lot of ways to cheat and most of them cannot be detected by Turnitin. (But I'm not going to tell you what they are, you mischievous Googler. You'll have to figure out how to cheat for yourself!) But I do think that students are deterred from participating in the very easy cut-and-paste kind of cheating that Turnitin can detect because they are pretty sure that they'll get caught. So that's not bad.

Teaching proper attribution: I think that a lot of the problems with student writing is not that they want to cheat but that they don't know how to use sources properly, especially electronic sources that can be cut and pasted so easily. I think that some students really don't get that it's cheating. (I know, that's a lot of benefit of the doubt there, but I tend to extend that benefit until I see evidence that it is undeserved. I like to think that people are trying to do good.) So allowing student to see their reports on Turnitin points them to poor paraphrasing and insufficient attribution, so they can then revise and resubmit. Great teaching moment. (Of course, some argue that it actually teaches them how to be better cheaters.)

Gradebook: It has a nice gradebook function that allows students to check their grades on their own and keeps a running tally so I don't have to do complicated math that I don't understand. Honestly, I don't know what grade a student is getting half-way through the semester. I can just do the formulas at the end. Plus, it annoys me when they ask. It also keeps attendence. But if you're using it, you should download a backup frequently.

Peer Review: The peer review function is pretty good. It can be anonymous or not, and the instructor has the option of choosing from a library of questions or of writing her own questions. You can set a word count requirement for responses. You can require a combination of short and long responses and numerical ratings. Lots of options. And students can leave marks one the paper to point out specific areas for comment or correction. Good stuff, overall.

Grademarking: Nice. I expected not to like it, but in the end was quite pleased. I wrote about it here.

Electronic paper submission: One simple aspect of it is the easy and secure method of electronic paper submission. Email can be so iffy. Inbox is flooded with trash, messages can get deleted or bounced, or you can just miss one altogether because students have not mastered the skill of the subject heading. This is a nice, central place to collect papers, and you can easily download them ALL in one step onto your hard drive for a backup instead of one paper at a time in email.

I've been thinking about all the different technologies I've used and am using now in class, and I'm going to write a series of posts about how I've used them in the past and how they might be useful in the future.