Hi all, I'm Tracy Wade and have been using TII for 20 years. As an Instructional Coach in Katy, TX, I have trained many teachers on how to leverage this tool in developing better student writers. I'm excited to learn how all of you use this important service in your classrooms. Favorite movie? Too hard...but I always love to watch "The Quiet Man" for some crazy reason, sort of like comfort food!

My name is Camela Giraud (pronounced like Pamela but with a "C").  I have been a teacher since 1995 mostly in independent schools. I started teaching in Miami, lived and worked in Salt Lake City for a while, now I live on Florida's Gulf Coast in Sarasota about an hour south of Tampa. My school is nearly 100 years old and divided on two campuses: a lower school on Siesta Key and then our middle and upper divisions 16 miles away in Lakewood Ranch. Our middle school is 1:1 with iPads and the upper school is 1:1 laptops. Our demographic is wealthy, for the most part, and college bound 100%.

Here's our challenge: We have a lot of tech tools, but as some of you have noted, teachers can be overwhelmed by too many tools when really want they want most is to teach their content and skills related to their disciplines. We've had Turnitin since I started at the school in 2008. There is really no point person who manages teaching teachers how to use Turnitin. The teachers who use it, primarily in the humanities, enjoy it for the ease of leaving rich comments and tracking changes. Since I am responsible for submitting the PO each year, I guess I am the point person. So I need to be more of a resource than I have been, I think. 

I know Turnitin can serve our community more than it does. While it's indispensable as a plagiarism detector, I think it's potential as a tool to teach writing is really underutilized. I hope that being a member of the forum can help me be more of resource for teachers, especially in this year of uncertainly and hardship in teaching. 

Favorite movie? This changes every time I see another new one. My standby answer to this question, however, is Raiders of the Lost Arc. But I also love quirky movies like Amelie. I also really love disaster movies--apocalypse, zombies, natural disasters, end-of-the world movies. I guess maybe I like it when the movie ends and the world really isn't on the brink of oblivion. Then there was Covid. Back to Amelie. 

Greetings all,  

My name is Melissa Johnston and I am the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme Coordinator at my school in Richmond, Virginia.  We have been working since 2015 to open our IB Programme to our student body at large and we see many students selecting IB courses in English and in the sciences.  One challenge is that we have a higher teacher turnover rate than I would like to see; my hope is to always improve as a mentor and coach so that good teachers are supported and want to stay but it can feel like we are always at square one with training because of the number of new teachers each year.

Students in the IB-DP do a lot of research and writing and we utilize Turnitin currently mostly as a plagiarism detection device, allowing students to see and work with their similarity reports before making their final submission that we send to IB for assessments. I hope that this workshop will help me improve my own understandings of Turnitin functions and help me develop effective ways to share that knowledge with others in my school. My goal is for our math and science teachers to identify Turnitin as an essential tool for the IB assessments they collect just as the English teachers do.  I hope that our whole school will value this tool.

Favorite movie?  So hard to choose!  But let's say the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Legends of the Fall, and an Italian one called Good Morning Night.