Plagiarism-related tools

As a teacher, you hope you will never need to use these tools, but once in a while a student turns in a writing assignment, which you suspect is not his own.

This happened to me last week when I asked my students to write film reviews to be published in our dedicated blog. We had previously worked on film-related vocabulary and read a few examples of film reviews so that they understood the format, style and register. We worked out which information was to be included and then we started working on the review:  a first draft written in class, draft back the next class with errors highlighted according to an error correction code and a second class to edit their drafts into a final version.

The overall result was amazing (You can check their reviews here). However, one student turned in a suspicious review of the film “The Little Fockers”. When I read “As Greg and his wife Pam prepare for their young twins' upcoming birthday, Jack is nursing a heart condition that's got him mulling who should become the family's patriarch should he die. For reasons that I won't bother to spoil, Jack selects Greg who, of course, must endure a new set of tests and expectations. Greg, though, stands to ruin it all when he begins working with an exuberant and unbelievably hot drug company sales rep….”, I knew he hadn`t written it so I tried to find out where he had copied it from and, unfortunately, I was right…. 

So, after having done a bit of research on plagiarism checking tools, here is a list of the options I found and checked with the following text:

As Greg and his wife Pam prepare for their young twins' upcoming birthday, Jack is nursing a heart condition that's got him mulling who should become the family's patriarch should he die.

The following tools returned results showing that the text had been plagiarized.

Google

http://www.google.com/

The Plagiarism checker

http://www.dustball.com/cs/plagiarism.checker/

Dupli Checker
http://www.duplichecker.com/

The following tools returned results saying that the work was original, no plagiarism.

Article checker
http://www.articlechecker.com/

Advanced plagiarism checker
http://searchenginereports.net/articlecheck.aspx

Plagiarisma

http://plagiarisma.net/

Plagiarism checker
http://www.plagiarismchecker.com/

Other tools

For this one, you need to sign up

Academic Plagiarism

http://www.academicplagiarism.com/

Free PC downloads

Viper

http://www.scanmyessay.com/plagiarism-detector.php

Sherlock

http://sydney.edu.au/engineering/it/~scilect/sherlock/

Tools to search for copies of your page on the web.

Copyscape

http://www.copyscape.com/

Check website plagiarism
http://www.plagiarismchecker.com/url/

I hope this brief report can help you choose the best tool for your context.

The Horizon Report 2011

The 2011 edition of the Horizon Report, a joint publication by Educause and The New Media Consortium,  has just become available.

It examines emerging technologies in relation to their potetial impact on teching and learning and categorizesthem according to the predicted time of adoption.

The following summary taken directly from the report is a good overview of you can expect to find.
"The internationally recognized series of Horizon Reports is part of the New Media Consortium’s Horizon Project, a comprehensive research venture established in 2002 that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact over the coming five years on a variety of sectors around the globe. This volume, the 2011 Horizon Report, examines emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in teaching, learning, and creative inquiry. It is the eighth in the annual series of reports focused on emerging technology in the higher education environment."

The 2011 Horizon report includes such technologies as Electronic Books, Mobiles, Game-Based Learning and others.

Click on the image to get the PDF version of the report

Teaching English through songs in the digital age (part 4 of 4): Music-related web 2.0 tools

Finally, this is the last part of the series which summarizes the #ELTchat from Jan 12th about Teaching English through songs: activities, resources and benefits of using songs for teaching. In this post I have collected music-related web 2.0 tools which were mentioned during the #ELTchat and examples of how to use them.

You Tube

• Music and lyrics copied and pasted on IWB.
• Put up a playlist on YouTube for students. So, if they like a song, then they can listen to more beyond class.
• There are lots of karaoke videos on Youtube; with just a computer and a mic, you can have a great singing lesson!

Spotify (Spotify is available in the following countries:Finland, France, Norway, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom) and Grooveshark

• Get students to make a playlist, then ask them to walk around class & find out who else’s they would listen to.

ESL video 

• Make a quiz on lyrics. Ss answer as they watch the video clip.

Lyrics training

• Great for autonomous work on the songs they like.
• Choose song, choose level, fill gaps. Music will stop.

Overstream 

• Ask students to subtitle song. Then compare each other’s versions

Wordle  and Worditout

• Do a word cloud to predict the song theme.
• Students make up their own song based on word cloud , then compare with real song to see who is accurate.
• A great warmer for a song is to stick the lyrics in Wordle or Worditout and ask learners to guess song from word cloud.

Other tools and websites

Tune into English is a fabulous free resource to use with students!!

English Central always includes a song for pronunciation work.

Karaoke Party is a great interactive online karaoke venue – very useful interface with ratings et al.

Tubeoke is also great. It shows the video and the lyrics alongside.


I hope these tools can really make the use of songs more fun. I have really enjoyed writing this series!

Teaching English through songs in the digital age (part 3 of 4): Specific songs and their uses

It´s now time for part 3 of the series which summarizes the #ELTchat from Jan 12th about Teaching English through songs: activities, resources and benefits of using songs for teaching.

Specific songs and their uses

1. Shakira´s “Fool” to look at words that share the same sounds.
2. “Anything you can do I can do better” for the comparative.
3. Katy Perry’s “Firework” to tackle a taboo subject.
4. A modals (for prediction) song is “The ballad of Billy Jo” – there’s a version by Sinead O’Connor.
5. “Eternal Flame” by the Bangles with Elementary level  -great present continuous, miming actions and body vocabulary practice.
6. For beginners get them to write new verse for “Don’t know much” song – good fun.
7. “Hello Goodbye” by The Beatles with beginners. I often ask them to write an extra verse.
8. A lesson where I used a song video to help teach vocabulary & grammar (likes and dislikes).
9. A blog post on using “Pencil full of lead” (the vid is superb for an EFL class).
10. Activities to work on pronunciation, as this one with “Bizarre Love Triangle”.
11. To practise present perfect continuous this song by Foreigner is great. Do A/B close gap activity.
12. Karaoke Lady Gaga’s "Bad romance" .
13. "Mad World" with multiple visuals: video 1, video 2 and video 3 .
14. Bob Dylan and Billy Bragg are great for stimulating discussions about issues.
15. “Taxman” by The Beatles to teach the comparative.
16. Great lesson on articles with “Penny Lane”.
17. “She’s leaving Home” for hard to find narratives.
18. Great new lesson plan on Lessonstream.org based on a “How deep is the ocean”.
19. "In the ghetto" would be an Elvis number I would pick.
20. Funny songs like “If I had a million dollars” by Barenaked Ladies are great for conditionals type 2.
21. A great 2nd conditional song is “When I win the lottery” by Camper Van Beethoven.
22. Black Eyes Peas´ “Where is the Love” is a song teens love…but tough to sing.  I challenge them to sing it from beginning to end for credits.
23. “Lucy in The Sky With Diamonds” is good for teaching prepositions.
24. Pub song “Show me the way to go home” to introduce Language Varieties.
25. Chumbawumba’s “Add me” is great for teens. You can have a seriously good discussion about internet safety afterwards.
26. Ask students to compare this video of “American Pie” (broken link) with either the movie or this other video.
27. “Take a bow” by Rihanna is good for showbiz vocabulary.
28. “Cosmic” by Jamiroquai is good for space vocabulary.
29. "Spanish Train" or "Patricia the Stripper" by Chris de Burgh are good story songs.
30. This video  of “Someday” by Nickelback is also great for starting a discussion as the end of it is quite surprising. 
31. Album ‘The Boy Bands Have Won’ some great story songs. Also Folk songs.
32. Australian singer/songwriter Paul Kelly has lots of great story-songs, but may be ‘too Australian’ for anywhere else.
33. For "Young Hearts" give lyrics, ask them to devise video clip THEN play it – music big contrast to words.
34. Paul Kelly – very Oz.
35. Daniel Powter for story songs,  his videos anyway "Free Loop" and "Bad Day".
36. Re: story songs  Sterephonics – ‘I stopped to fill my car up’ .
37. Re: story songs: “The Cruel War” by Peter Paul & Mary, “Spanish is the Loving Tongue” by Michael Martin Murphey.
38. There might be a (long) lesson in Dylan’s “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”.
39. Alanis Morisette´s “Hand in my pocket” and “You Learn” are great for opposites and actions, respectively.
40. To punctuate “In The Ghetto” and “Bang Bang My Baby Shot Me Down”.
41. “Conjunction Junction” not designed for foreign learners but still works. 
42. Michael Bublé video “Just haven’t met you yet” as a writing prompt for retelling.
43. Alanis Morisette´s “Ironic” – a great video to accompany this song for advanced learners is   – Ed Byrne (comedian).
44. I use this version of “In the ghetto” to demo importance of working on your pronunciation.
45. David Deubelbeiss´ #1 activity .
46. “Lemon tree” animation video. Check these amazing ideas by @evab2001!
47. “Jealous Guy” – John Lennon for Past Continuous and relationships.
48. “United Breaks Guitars” is another great storytelling song as well.
49. ‘Ode to Billy Jo’  video  – comments full of great discussion material.

 
Again it´s amazing to see how much information was shared in one hour over the #ELTchat! The last part of the series is coming soon...

Note: There´s a broken link in #26. Will try to fix it ASAP

Teaching English through songs in the digital age (part 2 of 4): Ideas for using songs

Following #ELTchat from Jan 12th about Teaching English through songs: activities, resources and benefits of using songs for teaching, this is part 2 on reasons and ideas for using songs.

Why use songs?

• Songs can be very effective to work on supra-segmental features of the language.
• Songs as poetry.
• Songs (and poems) a great way to look at words that share the same sounds.
• Songs provide multiple routes to language retention: rhythm, melody, metre.
• Songs are great for pronunciation practice especially sound linking and reduction.
• Slow songs can help students learn intonation, elision etc.
• Chants are good for pronunciation exercises.
• Songs enable bottom-up/top-down processing simultaneously.
• Songs are for great vocabulary extension / vocabulary themes.
• Songs can prompt discussion *about* the song.
• Songs are a great way to access slang.
• New options to “fill-in-blank”.

Possible tasks

1. Organize student presentations: 4-5 lines of lyrics, with translation, then short YouTube clip, then 100+ words on why they like the song.
2. Have background music to put students at ease when doing song tasks.
3. Have students write a song.
4. Use songs to encourage discussions in my literature classes. For ex Animal Farm with Revolution by The Beatles.
5. Use songs to prompt discussion *about* the song. Play a clip, students talk (Have you ever heard this, Do you like this, etc).
6. Use two versions of songs and get student s to compare them like 2 versions of Candle in the wind .
7. Take your PlayStation to class and use SingStar (karaoke) – great fun with teenagers.
8. Get student s to write additional verses.
9. Play song once, ask students to write down as many words as they can, pair them up, and ask them to create a new song with the words.
10. Use screen capture to take pics from a song video, they can then be used for ordering/ prediction(inspired by @cheimi10).
11. Have a Skype call with another class. (We sang for them and they sang for us! It was amazing!).
12. The usual pre, while and post listening/viewing phases: covers mood, vocabulary and application.
13. If there are different visuals to a music video, or advert using a song, it can be interesting to consider the differences.
14. Play the song and ask them to design a concept for the video.
15. Get Young Learners to mime song, teens to act out a scene of what they think happened. Improvising!
16. Get Weird Al’s versions and compare with originals. The videos are also a good idea.
17. Play a song as student s come into room at beginning of a class and do nothing with it; can have a great impact on general mood.
18. Ask students to participate in song selection too for ownership and deeper engagement! Give them 5 and have them vote on top 3!
19. Do a kind of Jukebox Jury with a handful of songs. Students have to vote for their favourite.
20. Use instrumental music as a way to frame a guided visualisation.
21. Ask students to draw while listening, then talk about what they drew.
22. Use a mix of music from the countries of my students. They have to explain similarities and differences in the sentiments of the songs
23. Let students choose a song about any global issue… sing along and discuss. When student s choose they feel empowered. They can even gap the songs themselves.
24. Get student s to research the singers/ bands and do projects or presentations on them.
25. Maybe ask your students to try to recreate this video.
26. Write key words on bits of coloured paper – hand out to student s – they have to stand up when they hear their word – usually great fun!
27. Look at songs as poetry: form, metaphor, emotion. Working extensively with lyrics post-listening can be very powerful.
28. With appropriate groups discussing “inappropriate” lyrics might be very productive.
29. When teaching poetry and figures of speech, start with a song…more accessible for teens.
30. Lyrics race: teams memorize one line of written song and race across classroom/hall to recorder who writes down. At end all listen.
31. Can be interesting to think about using and comparing cover versions with originals.
32. Look at different versions of same song and get students to listen out for differences in voice or Instruments as with Hallelujah.
33. Use literal songs – they’re so funny! (many on YouTube).
34. Get student s to make up new endings or make up their own versions of songs.
35. A nice idea with a story song : stop half way through the song and get student s to predict ending.
36. Give students half the rhyme and get them to make up the other half- Can be hilarious (careful with teens).
37. Scrambled lyrics: give students lyrics but put lines out of order. Students reorder, then listen.
38. Have children do their own songs to famous tunes, works really well with rap.
39. Play bits of songs / soundtracks and ask students to write adjectives they think of on the board – no repetition allowed.
40. Play a soundtrack and ask students to guess the kind of film – good for slightly out-of-date so not too easy.
41. Do grammar revision through song titles.
42. Use songs/videos as writing prompts. Students listen/watch, then retell or answer questions.
43. Eliciting a class story from a song or piece of music (eg Duo de las flores by Delibes).
44. Get student s making karaoke files (they learn while doing/sharing).
45. Use  karaoke versions of songs on YouTube and have an occasional sing off with students.

Hope you enjoyed part 2...more on the way!