Why

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Turnitin.com has two main benefits for the English classroom. First, and most obviously, the site is a major deterrent to plagiarism. Secondly, turnitin.com provides tools for assessing specific writing skills. You can create interactive rubrics and detailed comments that can be dropped into student papers.

You'll find more thoughts on using turnitin.com for effective writing instruction under Curriculum.

How

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• First, you need to create your account. Go to turnitin.com, click "New User," choose "Sign up for turnitin.com," and then choose "Instructor."
• You'll need to know the account ID and the join password. Ask Dustin Windsor or Chris Proctor. Then you can put in your email address and create a password.
• Now that your account is set up, create your classes (Period 1, Period 3, ...) so your students can join your classes.
• Finally, your students need to join your classes. The easiest way to do this is to go to the computer lab, and have students follow a set of instructions (on SchoolFusion or Google Docs). Click here to see the presentation I used to get my students set up on all our online tools for the year.
• Now you can create assignments and students can submit their work to the site. I like to create a sample assignment, discuss plagiarism and citation of sources, and then try out turnitin.com. This year, my students each 'wrote' a paper on the Chaps Band. I asked them to start with the Wikipedia entry verbatim, and then see if they could change it enough to trick turnitin. For my classes, this was an effective illustration of turnitin.com's effectiveness as a plagiarism detector.
• Now you're good to go. You could just use turnitin.com to enforce writing integrity, but if you want to use it for assessment too, you can click on the little apple icon by a student paper.