Most Popular Posts of the Year - #18, Plagiarism Checker

Like a lot of other people are, I'm taking this week to relax a bit and do some things that I haven't had time for lately. Therefore, all this week I'm rewinding the year by republishing the 25 most-read posts of the year. I hope that those of you who are also on vacation this week, enjoy every moment of it. See you (virtually) in the New Year.

Plagiarism, as teachers we see it a lot. Sometimes it's done intentionally, sometimes it's done accidentally. Either way we can't allow our students to plagiarize other people's works. Plagiarisma is a free tool that teachers and students can use to detect possible cases of plagiarism.

There are a few ways that you can use Plagiarisma. The easiest way to use Plagiarisma is to copy and paste a chunk of text into the Plagiarisma search box. You can also upload documents (RTF, Doc, PDF, HTML, ODT) to be scanned by Plagiarisma. The third option is to type a url into the search box to have Plagiarisma scan for possible cases of plagiarism. Whichever option you use, Plagiarisma will return a list of urls containing possible plagiarism matches.

Applications for Education
Plagiarism isn't always intentional on the part of students. Sometimes they honestly don't realize that they're doing it. Having students use Plagiarisma to scan their documents before submitting them for a grade, could help them identify flaws in their works and change them before it's too late.

Here are seven other tools for detecting and preventing plagiarism.