Since mid-November, the website turnitin.com allows students to submit  PowerPoints as part of their new features release. the new features release also includes bug fixes and increased support for foreign languages.

The paid service is offered student across the district at both the junior and senior high levels a way of turning in written assignments without having to give them to their instructor in person. It also allows teachers to check students work for plagiarism, and scans all uploaded work against written articles on the internet to see what percentage of the words and phrases are also used elsewhere. The site is paid for out of the budgets of Rock Bridges social studies and English departments.

This tool has been particularly helpful to AP world teacher Katherine Sasser .

“I think teaching sophomores, they come in not fully understanding what plagiarism is and what they can borrow and can’t borrow,” Sasser said. “Turnitin is a really quick and easy evaluative tool to point out to kids, ‘Hey when you copy and pasted this paragraph that was using too much of someone else’s information you can’t do it that way,’ so I really like it for that.”

This expansion will aid faculty and students in increasing the ease of reviewing projects.

“It would be helpful for both teachers and students,” Senior Zach Mefrakis said. “It will allow people to do more projects at home on their computer and turn it in whenever they need to.”

While the new feature might not be something educators were clamoring for, the new tool certainly will have it’s uses.

“I think it is very interesting,” Sasser said of the website’s new features. “I will probably utilize it but I can’t say I was longing for something like that or would thought I would have used power points for that kind of process but I guess it makes sense when students have access to all kinds of content and different mediums that they might be borrowing from power points for their own Powerpoints and so we can filter through the same process and have conversations about what is fair and appropriate to use in class or for products through power points just as we did with essays.”

By Pen Terry