• Canvas

    Preparing for Finals: How Turnitin and Proctoring Exams Can Help

    Reading Time: 2 minutes We’re quickly approaching the end of the semester, so it’s time to make sure you have all the info you need to finish strong. Today we’re going to be talking about finals, and make sure you check out our post about reviewing your gradebook and submitting your grades as you prepare to do that.   Because of the unique challenges of this year, your finals may look different from the norm. Whether you’re having your students write a final paper or take an exam, here’s a few features to consider as you make your plans.   1. Use Turnitin for written final projects  Turnitin integrates seamlessly into Canvas assignments – you only need to select “Turnitin” from the…

  • Canvas,  Educational Tools,  Teaching & Learning

    Turnitin Adds AI Writing Indicator to Similarity Report 

    Reading Time: 3 minutes It’s no secret that ChatGPT’s popularity is growing. And plagiarism detecting tools are aware of that – and the need to adjust their offerings to help identify when student work may have been supplemented or entirely created by AI. Turnitin recently announced that it will now display a score to instructors within the Similarity Report to indicate what percentage of a paper is highly likely to be generated by AI.  Turnitin is quick to say that their detection isn’t foolproof and the percentage displayed “should not be used as a definitive measure of misconduct or punitive tool.” The AI percentage is presented to inform instructors and…

  • Educational Tools,  Teaching & Learning

    ChatGPT: The New Frontier

    Reading Time: 2 minutes Sitting at my stand-up desk, I mused about the beginning of this post. Thwack! The idea came to me like a bug playing tag with my windshield on a South Dakota interstate in the middle of June. I would use ChatGPT, a freshly minted artificial intelligence (AI) chat robot. I asked Siri to play the theme from the movie Inception and carefully steered my browser to http://chat.openai.com. With Hans Zimmers’ electronic sound garden in the background, I placed my cursor in the chat box and typed, “Write a 300 word introduction to Servant Teaching.” ChatGPT began working on the query and produced, word-by-word, six paragraphs. I…

  • Canvas,  Educational Tools,  Teaching & Learning

    TurnItIn: Feedback Studio Updates and Contract Cheating

    Reading Time: 2 minutes We’ve talked about TurnItIn before in our Three Tips for Accurate Similarity Report Assessment, where we discussed how to efficiently set up TurnItIn to easily interpret the Similarity Report. Today we’re going to look at some updates to the tool which make TurnItIn even more robust and useful. TurnItIn now flags replaced or hidden characters as well as equips instructors to address suspicions that a student didn’t write a submitted paper.  Feedback Studio Flags This new section of the Feedback Studio marks items that you should review. A Flag does not guarantee a problem – it just identifies an item that warrants your attention. You can…

  • Canvas,  Educational Tools,  Teaching & Learning

    TurnItIn: Three Tips for Accurate Similarity Report Assessment

    Reading Time: 2 minutes Cedarville University (CU) provides all faculty and students access to TurnItIn to help improve writing and prevent plagiarism. TurnItIn accepts user documents and compares them to material located on the Internet and in TurnItIn’s document repository. After the documents are compared, TurnItIn produces the Similarity Report which shows the parts of a student’s paper that are similar to other sources. Here are three tips to help you read the Similarity Report. Tip 1: Familiarize yourself with what Canvas and TurnItIn can do Get up to speed with all of the functionality the Canvas and TurnItIn integration has to offer by viewing or downloading the Canvas Plagiarism…