Quick Facts 80% of college students admit to cheating at least once. (Center for Academic Integrity) 52% of 1,800 students at nine state universities had copied several sentences from a website without citation. (McCabe, D.L.) More than two-thirds of 2,100 students from 21 campuses copied or plagiarized work done by another student (Center for Academic Integrity) 15% of high school students admit to obtaining a paper from a term paper mill or website (Plagiarism.org) 50% of high-school students surveyed by Rutgers University see nothing wrong with cheating (McCabe, D.L. ) 90% of students believe that cheaters are either never caught or have never been appropriately disciplined (US News and World Report)

Free Tools for Detecting Plagiarism Google and Google Scholar: If a sentence strikes you as odd, put it in quotation marks and run a Google search on it. If the student cut and pasted the phrase, it will show up on Google. And as more books are uploaded onto Google Books, Google Scholar and Google Books will become increasingly powerful weapons against plagiarism. The Plagiarism Checker: The Plagiarism Checker allows you to run a Google search on large blocks of text. This is easier than cutting and pasting sentence after sentence. Articlechecker: Works the same as Plagiarism Checker, but gives you the option of checking against Yahoo as well as Google. Plagium: Like The Plagiarism Checker, this site Googles text you submit. Unlike most other checkers, Plagium works in several languages. PlagiarismDetect: A plagiarism detector that allows you to upload whole documents rather than cutting and pasting blocks of text. It's free, but you have to register. Duplichecker: Another checker that plugs submitted text into search engines. Duplichecker's interface makes it easy to submit entire documents as well as excerpts. SeeSources: Searches the Web for sources similar to the text you entered. You can scan both excerpts and whole documents. DOC Cop: Doc Cop offers a few features more than the minimal Web-based detection services. For instance, you can check for collusion—that is, you can check the similarity between two papers. However, you do have to register. WCopyFind: WCopyFind is a downloadable scanner that checks for similarities between two papers, but it can't search the Web. Viper: The Anti-Plagiarism Scanner. Although it's free, Viper is software, so it's a bit more of a commitment than Web-based tools. However, it has some neat features, such as side-by-side comparisons of the submitted text with the potentially plagiarized one. Viper touts itself as the free alternative to TurnItIn. SafeAssign/MyDropBox: This is free if you're already using a Blackboard Learning System. As students submit papers to Blackboard, SafeAssign checks their papers against its database of source material. PAIRwise: PAIRwise (Paper Authorship Integrity Research) can compare documents to one another while searching the internet for similar documents. However, PAIRwise is intended for use on an institutional level—for departmental or college-wide servers.

The five steps are:Step One: Teacher Use of Cell Phones for Professional PurposesStep Two: Teacher Models Appropriate Use for LearningStep Three: Strengthen the Home-School Connection with Cell PhonesStep Four: Students Use Cell Phones for HomeworkStep Five: Students Use Cell Phones for Classwork

Three Ideas for using cell phones for professional purposes. Use Polleverywhere to conduct staff surveys that would be useful and interesting to share with students and the school community. Use Twitter and have the updates feed into your class or school blog, website, or wiki to reinforce the home/school connection and build class/school pride.Set up Google Voice to serve as your personal secretary who will transcribe your messages and enable you to easily share with others.

Three Ideas for modeling appropriate use of cells for learningIt goes without saying then when modeling appropriate use of cells you do not have your phone ring or make any type of noise not related to instruction. With that as a given, here are three ideas.Model for your students how you use your cell phone to support your work using the phone for basic features like alarm clock, calendar, calculator, stop watch, note taking.Demonstrate how you can use your phone to gain information instantly using Google SMS or ChaCha.Use your cell phone as a camera often to capture student work and events and load them to Flickr so they can be embedded in your class or school website, wiki or blog.