Community reviews for Turnitin

I love this tool as does my department. It serves its purpose well. I really like the ease of some of the basic tenets of the program and in many cases it has helped my students learn from the feedback provided through the program. One of the major downsides to the program is that numerous features of the program are not intuitive. The user interface can be confusing to some and much training is required for most users to get them comfortable with the basics.

Overall, Turnitin is great for making my written assignments more efficient to collect, score, and give comments on. It takes the areas of writing feedback that can be automated (conventions and originality) and automates them, leaving me more time to focus on helping students improve their skills and content knowledge. It's also an excellent tool for distributing papers for peer review or collecting any assignment that can be created digitally. I appreciate the ongoing efforts at Turnitin to update their tool to integrate with Google Drive and other content-creation tools, and I hope that this service will only get better as time goes on. The weaknesses in this tool are related to communication. It's not really set up to gibe assignment directions to students, so I wind up posting those elsewhere, which just adds an extra step for students. While it does send a confirmation email to students to let them know their work has been successfully uploaded, there's no equivalent email to let them know that their work has been viewed, scored, or responded to by peers or teachers. Students also have to remember to log in to check my feedback, and there's no function to send the feedback to them via email, so I have to announce that separately as well. Ideally, I would like to see some automation in communicating feedback to students to keep the write-feedback-revise cycle moving along more efficiently.

I love this product. What I love most is the ease and speed with which I can now easily grade a classroom's papers. I also like the fact that students can submit the paper for edits multiple times, as well and the quick spelling and grammar feedback it give. Finally, I like the plagiarism tool and the ability to verify if the paper has been turned in before. The one area where it could serve better is if the similarity tool updated automatically. Right now it only updates if you re-run it for each submission. I had a situation where another teacher in department had a due date after mine for the same assignment and the paper came up as 99% similar. He had to contact me and I had to rerun the similarity report for my student so that we could confront them about turning in the same paper. Additionally there should be a tool that notifies students when a teacher has graded their work so that they know to log in again to check the feedback.

This is a great tool for writing to ensure students are submittig orgiginal work as well as to help them better their writing with the comments tools. The only downside is that it requires the students to have an email address to register and a password. The juinor high kids often forget their passwords from year to year and do not always know how to access their emails to recover so students must create a new account for a fee. There should be an option for students registered to certain classes for instructors to view usernames and passwords.

As a teacher, it saves me a lot of time when marking, once you create your comments and rubrics. The option to do peer assessment is great, as it provides me information if they understand the rubric and how they have been assessed. The feedback you provide to students is very detailed, clear and simple, as it's basically dragging comments (previously done) where need it, or make/add new comments. Therefore, it is very constructive. Also, for me as a science teacher and teaching kids for 3 years in a row, I can see the progress after time, as the students are more familiar with the rubric/comments, and they can go back to see the feedback they got in the last lab report before submitting a new one. therefore avoiding mistakes they had in the past, as the rubrics for lab reports are the same.

Turnitin is an online “originality” checker (read: plagiarism checker) and feedback system that everyone is education seems already to know of. While other plagiarism checkers are out there, none have the user base (1.6+ million educators), or the rich feedback system, than TurnItIn has. TurnItIn allows teachers to grade, comment, and highlight student work, and for students to access that same feedback, so the tool potentially becomes a formative assessment and dialogue for writing, with the original draft and other iterations remaining as artifacts of learning. TurnItIn provides many options for teachers, so it is flexible. Teachers can set the system up so that kids can see their originality score immediately upon submission of their work, and to re-submit work after addressing issues of plagiarism. In this way, TurnItIn can become a partner is teaching proper citation, which is ever so important at the college level. Therefor we must teach kids proper citation skills while in K-12. Its popularity gives TurnItIn enough clout that LMS providers routinely embed TurnItIn into their assignment generation routines. Just point and click! My primary concern is in the application of TurnItIn. Just as a screwdriver is perfectly suited for turning screws, it still makes a poor tool for spreading peanut butter or jam on bread. So, too, TurnItIn is best when used as formative assessment and feedback tool in the teaching-learning process. It is underused, at best, and misused at worst, when TurnItIn is used as a “gotcha!” to “catch” kids plagiarizing work.

This is a great tool. I have also tried to run this activity with Blackboard and with Google groups. Blackboard is too slow and difficult to use. Google Groups is really not very user friendly. The turnitin.com interface is extremely user-friendly without too many options and settings to fret over. It also provides a very safe and private environment for the students. The only thing I do not like is that I like to include outside experts in my discussion boards: other teachers the students have, friends who are college professors, working scientists or mathematicians. It is not easy for them to join the discussions on the turnitin boards. They must create accounts and join the class as students. Google Groups does make this a little easier.

I like the originality checker and the grammar tool. The students can easily see how much of their paper is considered plagiarized. This is a great opportunity to reinforce authentic research methods and properly citing text. The grammar tool hit the mark 90% of the time which is a great time-saver. Having a due date on all assignments eliminates the "...but I turned it into you..." Either it's turned in by the deadline or it's not. The discussion boards were tested by my AP students last year and worked for the most part. I liked the due dates and that usually motivated students to complete their discussions quickly rather than wait until the last minute.

I really like the product overall. I think that Turnitin gives students and families an opportunity to see what it academic expectations are. The tools are time-saving and applicable to all teachers - as we all need to be writing! There are a few spots that are clunky. You have to add an assignment to each class separately, rather than just 'add to all'. And, the dates due, opening up reports is sometimes hard when you are working on a tight timeline - which I often find myself!

I love this program for paraphrasing. It is also easy to use on a mobile device for grading. It is a bit difficult to submit papers on turnitin. It seems an excessive number or steps.