Turn it in to TurnItIn in Moodle

Nothing makes me happier at work than a teacher getting more excited than me about something in technology. Last Thursday was a really happy day for me.

After a few weeks of silly errors and issues, I finally had our new TurnItIn Moodle Direct integration ready to deploy and was playing around with a TurnItIn rubric when a teacher looked over my shoulder and asked if she could watch what I was doing. This prompted me to explain my latest project - encouraging more people to use our TurnItIn subscription by letting them use TurnItIn from within Moodle. And her response was my favorite kind. Excited about this new prospect, she went directly back to her desk and not only created her own first TurnItIn assignment in Moodle, complete with grading form, but also told the rest of her PLC right away. And got THEM excited for it.

I thought I was going to have to beg people to try this. Apparently not.

So why do this? 

The reasons to use TurnItIn are numerous. Paperless assignments, originality checking, online grading, digital portfolios, and data collection are a few. Since I started using TurnItIn ten years ago, I have seen vast improvements to the GradeMark program, especially the new Grade Anything platform that allows teachers to grade any kind of file, presentation, performance, etc within GradeMark. The iPad app is something I would have loved eight years ago when I was lamenting my decision to collect essays only via TurnItIn, but was headed for a twelve hour car ride with no internet connection - with the iPad app, you don't need an internet connection once you sync a set of assignments. Easy. Lovely.

Now it's even easier to use here at CJ. No need for teachers or students to log into another account to use the main features of TurnItIn. For everyday use, they can simply create and upload assignments via Moodle... which is an essential part of almost every class here. Logging into TurnItIn will still be useful to gather data from GradeMark Reports, but it isn't necessary every day, nor is it needed by the students. 

From the reaction I've gotten from just a few teachers, I'm thinking this will be a good thing.

Resources:

• TurnItIn's Moodle Direct page containing...
• Instructor Manual
• Student Manual
• Training Videos
• FAQ
• TurnItIn Product Demonstration Videos

Social Media: What Teens Can Teach Us

The first thing I did when I opened by computer today was read "tweets" from sophomores in the Honors World Literature class here at CJ. They were tasked with summarizing sections of Oedipus Rex in 140 characters or less and to share them in a forum on their Moodle page. I had helped the teacher design the assignment earlier in the week, suggesting a discussion forum on Moodle as a venue for students to share/turn in their Tweets. 

Though the students mostly ended up paraphrasing instead of summarizing, the result of the assignment was a "feed" of "tweets" that both captured the essence of the play's drama (they were working with the end of the play - secrets revealed, eyes gouged out, etc.) and displayed a witty use of that simple symbol that has taken over social media - the hashtag. I had to share a few of them here:

The teacher who gave this assignment was pleased with the results and is considering make it a regular task in the class - good practice with an essential skill and a little bit of fun make for a good assignment in my eyes. That the students embraced this assignment and got creative with these hashtags signifies a victory - and I'm pretty sure the teacher (not on Twitter or Facebook... or any social media, if I recall correctly) learned something about Twitter and hashtags via this simple assignment.

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A bit later, another colleague stopped by my desk to share a blog post with me... and it was very enlightening. I'm sure it has made its way around social media already, since it is all about social media, but I'd still like to share it here. And wow, did it make me feel old and out of it...

The author, Andrew Watts (@thatswattsup), gives an overview of what he has observed about social media from the perspective of teens - and between his initial article and a follow-up post, he covers all the big ones.

I hadn't heard of many of the apps and platforms he explains, and many of them just don't seem relevant to me at this stage in my life. But as an educator working with teens and technology, it's good information to have.

Time to go exploring...