Plagiarism and Turnitin

In this day and age it is easy for students to feel the urge to copy and paste material in a word document. I always try to teach students in my classroom the rules of plagiarism as well as the correct way to cite sources in their written documents.  I have used the Turnitin program, which notifies teachers and students with the percentage of their document that is plagiarized. The higher of a percentage you receive on your written document means that there is plagiarism in your document.  The program takes 15 minutes to review your paper and give you results on the percentage of your paper that could be plagiarized. I think this program can be used in the k-12 setting as well as the college level. Plagiarism is a serious offense that students have a hard time understanding, but I think instructors need to make students aware of how to correctly cite information into their paper. I always try to tell my students that I want to be able to read information they have written not repeated verbiage from a website.