CBS Sunday Morning's featured story on plagiarism included intimate interviews with infamous plagiarists Quentin Rowan and Jayson Blair, and includes a brief conversation with Turnitin CEO Chris Caren.

Quentin Rowan authored his first novel, "Assassin of Secrets" in 2011 and was found to largely be a mash-up of 20 different books including popular James Bond titles. "There are stretches that go for maybe 10-15 pages, where the only thing changed are the names," Rowan said.

In our most recent Turnitin Academy Live webinar, Developing Critical Thinking Skills with PeerMark, we asked our attendees, "What are the benefits of peer review and why do we bother?"

Some of your colleagues answered:

• "I think it's still good for kids to see other writing."
• "It helps students see if they are communicating well."
• "They are learning to objectively look at writing."
• "It is a rich source of feedback."
• "Enlarges their sense of audience past just thinking only the instructor is reading their papers."
• "The reviewer profits as well as the reviewee."

Find out how and why you should be using peer review in your classes, regardless of what subject you teach. You can watch a recording of Developing Critical Thinking Skills with PeerMark at your convenience and you can view all of our previously recorded webinars at the Turnitin Academy Live page in the Training Center.

Turnitin will no longer support the Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) browser starting in January 2013. In order for us to continue improving Turnitin and offering features to help instructors improve student writing, our development team needs to make use of the capabilities in modern browsers. This is part of being a leading software-as-a-service.

We've always advocated Turnitin OriginalityCheck to be used as a tool to teach proper citation and source integration, to address academic integrity, and to make investigating potential plagiarism easier.

OriginalityCheck at its core is simple to start exploring and using in your classroom. By providing visual feedback, you and your students can get a good representation of how well they've integrated outside source material into their writing. At a glance, you can take a closer look into papers with higher matches.

Turnitin has released six writing rubrics that are aligned to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). These new rubrics are available now in the Rubric Library if you are affiliated with a middle school, high school, or community college account in the United States. If you are not affiliated with these eligible schools, you can download the Common Core Rubric Pack (.zip) and import the .RBC files into your Rubric Library.

In response to states' adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), Turnitin will be releasing CCSS-aligned writing rubrics for grades 9-10 and 11-12. There will be a total of 6 rubrics altogether (2 each for Informative, Argumentative, and Narrative text types). These rubrics were developed for Turnitin by the English Professional Learning Council, a group of educators sponsored by and involving instructors primarily from Saddleback College and the Orange County Department of Education.

Many Turnitin users that have access to GradeMark are not aware of what an essential, powerful and effective tool it can be.

Cath Ellis, an English literature instructor, blogger, and e-learning enthusiast, recently wrote on her blog about how merely checking for potential plagiarism is such a minor part of her use. She expounds on her use of GradeMark and the benefits of being quicker, better, easier, and retrievable. Her students prefer their papers being reviewed in GradeMark because of the confidentiality, accessibility, and convenience that Turnitin provides.

The 5th International Plagiarism Conference started last Tuesday (July 17, 2012) with a welcome address from Turnitin's Vice President of International, Will Murray, and an opening address from Craig Mahoney, chief executive of the Higher Education Academy. The kickoff continued with a morning keynote from Dr. Tracey Bretag of University of South Australia, discussing policy, practice, and the student perspective. An afternoon keynote from Dr. Virginia Barbour from the Committee on Publication Ethics spoke about plagiarism from an editor's perspective. During the day there were also an additional 22 available sessions and workshops.

We're excited to announce that Turnitin can now support paper submissions in right-to-left languages (Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu, and more) with the full functionality of Turnitin's Document Viewer. The Document Viewer allows you to view a fully-formatted paper that retains images, charts, tables, and columns. 

TeacherCast's Jeff Bradbury talks with Turnitin's Ray Huang and Jason Chu to talk about Turnitin, GradeMark, and Common Core State Standards.

TeacherCast App Spotlight: @Turnitin

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