Plagiarism of texts. Surely, like me, you will have found yourself reading a text from one of your students and you have doubted whether this text has been written by him or has been taken from the internet. The truth is that at certain ages it is relatively easy to detect plagiarism in a text. But at other times it is not so easy and the doubt assails us.
That is why in today’s article I want to let you know a series of free plagiarism checker software with which in a few seconds you can check the authorship of the texts that your students give you and know whether or not there is plagiarism. Do you want to know what tools I use to detect plagiarism in a text? If so, join me in reading this article. Keep reading: Do you know how to use technology in the classroom?
The plagiarism of texts
Even today I am reminded of a text by a student from the 1st year of ESO (12-13 years old) who gave me an essay for a literary contest in my center. A few seconds after reading the text I began to realize that something did not fit between the maturity of my student and the maturity that was glimpsed in the text. And more when the few lines of reading said narration began to appear words like “idiosyncrasy”, “indelible” or “intangible.”
But, what happens when you know for sure that this text has not been written by that student, but has been taken from a website? Well, it ends up being your word against yours.
In any case, when I asked that student about what the words “idiosyncrasy” mean, “indelible” and “intangible” of course he was unable to define them properly.
All in all, there are times when you do not have proof. Hence, a good option to detect plagiarism and, by the way, prove it through tests, is the use of web tools that aim to discover who has committed the plagiarism of a text.
List of plagiarism checker software
Web tools to combat plagiarism. Next, I am going to introduce you to four free web tools that I think may be of your interest:
1. PLAGIUM (RECOMMENDED)
Possibly it is the simplest tool that you can find on the internet to check if a text has been copied in its entirety or only partially. This tool allows you to compare texts that do not exceed 5,000 characters. It also allows the advanced search option. Its free version is more than enough to check possible texts susceptible to plagiarism.
Here is a screenshot of Plagium. As you can see, there is a box in which you must write the text that you think is plagiarized and give it to the intro. The tool itself is responsible for searching the indexed pages of Google the identical text or its matches.
Once the search is done, you can see if there is a match or not. I have done a test and I have copied in the text box some paragraphs of an article of my blog entitled 20 Questions for your students to learn to think. Metacognition . In the following screenshot of Plagium you can see:
- The inserted text that corresponds to a blog article
- The number of remaining characters I can write to check plagiarism
- The URL that matches the text and that serves as a test to teach the student
- The percentage of coincidence of the text with the text or texts to which the tool refers. In this case, since I copied my text literally, there is a 100% match.
- It is important to say that the text that I copied in the text box, had a stay in the network less than three weeks.
2. THE PLAGIARISM CHECKER
Like Plagium, you just have to paste the text that you think is susceptible to plagiarism and automatically appear links related to that text from the pages indexed by Google
3. PLAGIARISM
It is another online tool that, like the previous ones, searches in Google, Yahoo and Bing for texts in formats such as PDF, DOC, ODT or TXT. This tool against plagiarism also allows you to paste addresses of web pages. It has a free desktop version for the Windows Operating System.
4. COPYSCAPE
Another online tool that has the peculiarity of allowing you to search the web for copies of the pages of a website. It is always disappointing to find a text plagiarized or partially plagiarized by some of your students. The school must be a space that promotes above all the culture of effort, and, therefore, also the creativity of its students. We must teach the youngest to know how to handle information, to learn to cure content, to be inspired by good texts, but not to copy them literally.
I hope you do not have to use these web tools that I have indicated in this article. And if so, I hope you can convey to your students the value of effort, the importance of creativity and the merit of ingenuity. You might also read: http://srewang.com/how-does-free-school-transport-work-all-the-rules-explained/
