Saturday, May 16, 2009

Facing fears while exploring new tools....

Friday 15th May saw Vickel and I facilitating our second Turnitin workshop - this time with faculty from Early Education. Learning from the last workshop we took a spare projector and speakers, which is just as well as the sound wasn't working in the lab!

earlyeducation2_crpd

Everyone arrived with varying amounts of trepidation. After an initial icebreaker activity to find out what everyone was hoping to get out of the session we moved onto the first hands-on activity. Having logged into the Moodle Turnitin site, participants typed their definition of plagiarism into their Moodle blog along with why students might plagiarise and how they could be supported to avoid it, andthey then checked each others' postings. There appeared to be a sense of enjoyment around sharing postings and ideas that led to a discussion around other types of plagiarism that included collusion, images, diagrams, and a quick overview of creative commons licensing.

earlyeducation3_crpd_sml

The group watched a Fox News clip around Turnitin and discussed their reactions to it. This segued nicely into a hand over to Vickel who took everyone through the steps of setting up accounts, demonstrated how to read a Turnitin report, and then encouraged people to submit a piece of their own writing.

The session closed with a lively discussion around the potential of the Turnitin as a formative teaching tool, as well as around some of the considerations and issues it raised.

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