With a lot more students using the internet as their main research tool many teachers have been asking about how to check plagiarism.
There are many different plagiarism checkers out there but the one that I have found to be the best free option is plagiarismchecker.com
When I introduced this online tool to my students panic broke out. Plagiarism Checker continues to strike fear in the hearts of my students.
How to check plagiarism with plagiarism checker:
1. Have your students give you an electronic copy of their work
2. Go to Plagiarismchecker.com
3. Randomly copy a few sentences of your students work and paste it into Plagiarism Checker
Any work that has been copied and pasted off the Internet will appear in bold. If there are a large number of words strung together in bold (see the screen shot below) then your student has cut the information from a website and pasted into their document without making the information their own.
Plagiarism Checker will give you the reference to where the students have accessed the information.
As an aside note; it is interesting sometimes to see how much websites plagiarise each other. You often will see a number of websites that have content that is exactly the same as each other.