Plagiarisma is a free tool that teachers and students can use to detect possible cases of plagiarism.

There are several ways you can use Plagiarisma.  You can copy and paste a chunk of text into the Plagiarisma search box, or you can upload a whole document for scanning by Plagiarisma. A third alternative is to type an URL into the search box and have Plagiarisma scan for possible plagiarism.

The results list will give you a list of URLs with possible plagiarism matches.

As well as being hugely useful for teachers at all levels (especially secondary and tertiary) this tool allows students to check their own work before handing in an assignment – as they sometimes don’t realise that they’ve plagiarised someone else’s work.

For more, read here .

Richard Byrne, on his blog, Free Technology for Teachers, offers seven other tools for detecting plagiarism.  Each is described on an earlier blog post.

Janet McFadden