TURNITIN
WHAT IS TURNITIN?
Turnitin is an online resource teachers and students who want to enhance their writing and research skills. It is a web based platform that finds and shows matching and unoriginal part of text. It makes use of data-mining to gather a huge databases of academic articles and written staff which are electronic and are stored by Turnitin.Turnitin simply controls the assignment against its database of materials to check the originality of the text and check the matches between the assignment and the materials in its database.

HOW DOES IT WORK?
Turnitin describes its role as follows: “while we never claim to replace the instructor as the final, most qualified decision-maker in assessing the originality of a student’s assignment, we narrow the research process – allowing the instructor to focus on the task of education, not investigation”.(turnitin.com)
Turnitin uses dat-mining to bring a number of electronic article together. It identifies the matches between the submitted assignment and the article in its database including student essays library sources etc. When an assignment submitted online to Turnitin an originality report is collected and this report is posted to the instructor’s site in a while. This report shows the parts that matches the source within Turnitin and provides links to these sources. So the instructor will be able to see the comparison made by Turnitin .com and judge whether the students did plagiarism or not
Originality Report
In originality report it shows the matches between the submitted text and the database and the percentages and the links are provided. The matching parts are shown in a different color so as to differentiate from others.
There are three databases used in order to identify the matches:
Both a current and an extensively archived copy of the publicly accessible internet
Commercial pages from books, newspapers, and journals
Student papers already submitted to Turnitin

This is a kind of class portfolio that shows the assignments that students submitted and this page also shows the textual matches.
This is the percentage of the matches that are found

HOW TO REGISTER IN TURNITIN.COM? HOW TO USE IT?
There are two faces of Turnitin for instructors and students.
For Instructors
Either the instructor or his/her institution get the license for Turnitin
The administrator of your account receives an account ıd number and creates an account password. These id and account passwords are given by Turnitin Administration to the institutions like high schools and universities.
3. After creating your user profile go Turnitin.Com and enter your email and password for your homepage as an instructor.
4. Setting up a class: When you log into your homepage you will see the button add a class and do the followings:
5. After setting your class you can add assignments and give due dates for the assignments.
For Students
For students to enroll :
1. You have to get the class id and the password from your instructors
2. Then go to Turnitin.com and create a user profile then use the class id and password
3. After creating your user profile go to turnitin.com and log in with your e mail address and password
4. On your profile you will see the buton enroll in a class, enter your class id and enrollment password for the class
5. When you are signed in your class you can submit your assignments.
Applications of Turnitin
1. Originality Checking: This application is one of the best way that lets educators check the students work in order to prevent the possibility of plagiarism and to teach them how to do proper in text citation.
2. Grademark: This tool frees the instructors from dealing with papers spending a lot of time. With this application instructors can follow the track of the develpoment of the students. They can put some comments on the assignments so that students can see and try to change their mistakes.
3. Peer Review: This application of Turnitin gives students the opportunity to review their friends’ works. With peer review students will be able to think critically and learn how to evaluate and make criticism of another work and also they will see their mistakes in their peers work so they will understand much more easily.

However some people say that it makes students feel guilty treating them as criminals. They say it promotes an atmosphere that all the students do plagiarism until it is detected.
One of my instructors used Turnitin in one of our class and I think it was really useful. We could see our mistakes and we could do peer review which enabled us to see our mistakes in a more real way. For its advantages first of all it is really deterrent to plagiarism. Moreover it is much more useful to the instructors than to the students because it frees the instructors from a lot of staff like grading, reduces the time necessary for checking plagiarism. Students and instructors get report of their work which makes them aware of their progress. Also it has a kind of color detecting system: It does not simply says there is a plagiarism but it has certain colors for certain percentages of plagiarism. In this way it does not just call students as guilty but tries to deter them from what they have done.
Even without Turnitin instructors are trying to detect the parts that may not belong to the students or referenced incorrectly. So Turnitin helps the instructors to review the assignments which reduces the percentage of the plagiarism done and the time spent on grading mark and searching for plagiarism.