A Suggested Website Under the Microscope.

When looking through my blog subscriptions I always see and end up endorsing a few links.  I always take a peek at the links to determine if they are worthy of my support J  The following will take you on a quick walk through a website that has been recommended by another blogger.  

I’m sure you are on the edge of your seat waiting to take this journey with me!

Introduction

Free Technology for Teachers by Richard Byrne wrote an article about a free plagiarism tool online.  Plag Tracker  is a free site that is available to students to check their papers for plagiarism.  Byrne’s snippet of an review is also linked to several others ideas for checking your papers.  Plag Tracker doesn’t require you to download anything to your computer (good, I have enough already).  It appears to be easy to use and you can also pay for other services.  I'm curious to find out what other services he is talking about...?  When you copy and paste your work on the site you can take a poll suggested other services to be checked.  I don't know why I took the poll, this is the first time I've been on here so what do I know.  It was only the click of the button, I chose "proofreading/editing" just in case you were curious.  It claims that it can check my paper in “one minute or less”.  Or it is free?  Oh wait, it already is.  

My Plag Tracker Experiment

So here it goes I am going to submit a paper that I wrote last year I am starting at 9:25 pm.  I copied and pasted and it is telling me that it may take some time. 20 minutes?! Is my computer that slow?  There it goes, it completed the check by 9:27 pm. 

The results…

It only checked the first 5000 characters of my paper, but I can subscribe to get the whole thing checked at a faster rate.  So it isn't free, well unless I type less than 5000 characters.  It gives me the option to submit a new document to have checked, so I guess if I had the time I could find the next 5000 characters and do my check over and over until my whole paper is complete.  

In the first 5000 characters it tells me that I have “6% of non-unique content that appears in 10 sources”.  It conveniently highlights the words for me.  The two words “classroom instruction” put together must be common.  I feel relieved to know that the first 5000 characters of my paper were checked without any problems.  Yay!  I escaped the plagiarism police.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I think that I will continue looking for a site that can check all of my characters for free in a fast manner.  No gold medals here, I would rate it a 4.  Don't just suggest a website, people.  Look at it carefully  and test it out.