Detecting Plagiarism

Plagiarism Activities

These activities were designed by Meg Ormiston to be used with teachers as hands on practice to demonstrate how quickly and easily students can plagiarize some types of assignments.

Part #1

For this section of the workshop I break the teachers into small groups and hand out one of the activities to each group. I set a timer and the groups use their new advanced searching skills to compete against each other. I then ask each group to save the file to a shared folder on the network or I use my USB flash drive to collect the projects. Next I teach the groups how to use Google to detect plagiarism. The second part of the assignment is for each group to take another group's "assignment" and detect where they copied it from.

Part #2

The most import part is the follow-up to this. The preventing plagiarism section. This is done away from the computers again in small groups. Each group is asked to redesign the assignment to prevent plagiarism. This is the most important part of this presentation. This activity has been very successful with hundreds of teachers and administrators. the focus is not on "catching kids" instead I designed this to help teachers understand how quickly and easily low level assignments can be plagiarized.

Plagiarism Prevention Activities for Educators

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