Today, Samsung introduced GALAXY Gear, better known as the much anticipated "Smart Watch," allowing users/wearers to access text messages, email, chat, and certain apps like Evernote. This has the potential to be yet another way for students to use technology to cheat—Mashable covered several of these methods last year.

Of course smart watches aren't anything all that new, I grew up in the era of calculator watches and TI-82s. I remember teachers asking students to remove their watches along with hats, and some teachers went so far as to clear the memory from those big graphing calculators.

In a way it'll be a new way of doing the same fundamental type of cheating, the crib sheet. Every educator will have their own way of addressing these issues, whether it's a no-tech policy, use of monitoring systems, or an academic honesty pledge.

Do you think this will be an issue in your classes? If so, how will you address it? Let us know in the comments.

The Center of Education Policy released a report based on a survey of 40 states that have adopted the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) about assessments aligned to the Common Core. This was in an effort to learn more about states' policies, progress, and challenges in assessing students' mastery of the CCSS and preparing to implement assessments aligned to these standards.

Key Findings:

27 of the 40 states surveyed have already taken steps to start assessing students’ mastery of the Common Core or will do so before the consortia-developed assessments are ready in school year 2014-15.	Half of the survey states have begun undertaking activities to prepare teachers to interpret and use the results of the diagnostic assessments being developed by the state testing consortia.
19 of the states surveyed have started working with districts and schools to plan both extra assistance for students who may need help in passing CCSS-aligned exams and remediation for students who fail the exams on the first try.	Only 8 survey states are considering temporarily suspending consequences for schools or individuals based on student performance once the CCSS-aligned assessments are administered.
33 survey states are planning to conduct public relations efforts to help educate parents and other stakeholders about the reasons why students may not perform as well on the CCSS-aligned assessments as on current state tests.	A majority of the survey states that belong to one or both of the state testing consortia expressed positive views about key features of the consortia-developed assessments.
17 of the states surveyed are considering administering CCSS-aligned assessments in addition to or instead of those being developed by Smarter Balanced or PARCC.	A majority (34) of survey states report facing challenges with various aspects of preparing to administer the CCSS-aligned assessments.

Student Success Week will take place from October 28th to November 1st with the theme Moving Feedback Forward. Turnitin along with its sponsors invite papers or presentation topics for its first virtual conference on the implications of feedback on student success. In particular, we are interested in papers or presentations that discuss the impact of using web-based tools to provide feedback and how these approaches improve student success.

We welcome papers that, for example, detail best practices in the classroom (traditional, hybrid, and online), share research on strategies for providing effective feedback using technology, and discuss the discrete student outcomes of using web-based approaches to support student learning.

Proposals should be 300 words or less, but feel free to include links to additional information, previously published work, or examples. If you are interested in presenting, please submit your presentation proposal for any of our six topical areas:

Submit Your Proposal

If your proposal is accepted, we will invite you to participate in one of our daily virtual conference sessions the week of October 28th to November 1st. The sessions will be 45 minutes in length and be delivered via a web conferencing platform. Sessions will be held from 10:00 - 10:45am PST. Other proposals will be considered for guest blogs and papers that will be made available for download.

Complimentary and Complementary. No, it's not a lesson on grammar—it's Turnitin for iPad^®.

On Thursday, we introduced the new Turnitin for iPad app featuring your favorite feedback features from Turnitin available at your fingertips. The app, for instructor use only, is available as a free download on the App Store—that's the complimentary part.

Turnitin for iPad is the perfect companion to the web version of Turnitin and LMS-integrated versions of Turnitin—that's the complementary part.

<pAccording to the Higher Education Technology Survey conducted by the Consero Group, 78% of CIOs surveyed said their departments have little or no ability to stop students from using information technology to cheat. Specifically, 30% said they had no ability to prevent cheating, while 48% classified their ability to prevent it as "low."

 

"With the evolution of technology generally, the ability to cheat has evolved," said Consero CEO Paul Mandell. So he found it surprising that the vast majority of the respondents said the IT function is not involved in preventing cheating.

Do your students find your feedback helpful? What are the types of feedback that students are most apt to respond to?

Turnitin recently conducted a survey of 1,000 students to gather insights into how instructor feedback impacts the development of student writing. Specifically, the survey sought to uncover what students value most in terms of instructor feedback and how the timing of feedback affects the development of their writing skills.

Our friends at PlagiarismAdvice.org are hosting a series of six plagiarism advisory webinars under the theme of fostering and encouraging academic integrity, aimed at teaching staff. Educators at all levels will benefit from the series which is presented by academics from the UK, Australia and the Middle East and is enhanced by experiences from their personal teaching experience.

Why Do Students Plagiarise? | May 22
Identifying Plagiarism in Student Work | May 29
Reducing Plagiarism through Assessment Design | Jun 5
A Quick Guide to Referencing | Jun 12
Using Electronic Sources | June 19
Case Processing | Jun 26

Turnitin created a new interactive website, "Ratings for Top Student Sources," which ranks the most popular online sources found in student papers.

Turnitin partnered with a team of educators who scored the online sources most frequently used by secondary and higher education students in six categories: academic, social media, paper mills, encyclopedias, news/portals, and shopping sites. The educators used the Source Educational Evaluation Rubric (SEER) to rate 197 sources on the level of their authority, educational value, intent, originality, and quality. Visitors to the interactive site can set their viewing preferences using combinations of these attributes.

After evaluating the 190 posters submitted to Plagiarism.org's Originality Matters Student Poster Contest, and narrowing it down to ten finalists, we emerged with a winning poster designed by Madeline Ocampo, a 17-year-old senior studying visual arts at Los Angeles County High School for the Arts (LACHSA).

29 to 31 May 2013 - Hong Kong

Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU)

With a theme of "Learning Outcomes: impact on next generation learners", the forum is an excellent opportunity for members of the educational community to get together and discuss the issues that matter to them.

A major focus of the event will be technologies which can be used to bring about effective improvements in student learning outcomes. Subjects under discussion will include innovative teaching and learning and influence of outcomes on instructional changes.

More info