Helpful tool to reteach authentic research

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.