KIDS THESE DAYS:

The technological applications for improving the education of our children continue to advance.

Over the past few weeks, I have touted Teleparent, a voice-mail system used by the Newport-Mesa Unified School District to keep parents informed of their child’s progress in school. Sometimes, the Teleparent messages are good, sometimes they are not, and sometimes they are neutral, such as when they are reminding parents that their child should be studying for a test.

Another advancement is the ability of parents to access a school website and get even more information, including a current class grade. These public folders are password-protected to prevent prying eyes from obtaining information on other students.

A few days ago, however, our daughter had to turn in an essay via a special website and it was then I realized just how far we’ve come.

Our daughter, Kaitlyn, is a senior in a high school outside of the Newport-Mesa Unified School District. She has been there since the eighth grade when we took her out of TeWinkle Middle School.

Since then, she has been living proof that not all kids hate school and not all kids need a rigid formula in order to learn.

That evening, she finished her essay and told me our printer was not necessary because she was sending it to turnitin.com, better read as “Turn It In.”

Intrigued, I visited turnitin.com, and found a major emphasis on the prevention of student plagiarism.

Turnitin.com claims its plagiarism-prevention method is used by “thousands of institutions in over 80 countries.”

The process is simple: Students turn in their work online, then the Turnitin.com process checks it for passages that may have been lifted from another source. Then the work is returned with an “Originality Report.”

Again quoting from the website, “Results are based on exhaustive searches of billions of pages from both current and archived instances of the Internet, millions of student papers previously submitted to Turnitin, and commercial databases of journal articles and periodicals.”

Plagiarism among high school students is a huge issue and I have to believe that the ease of access to information and sources online has contributed to the problem.

According to some statistics on the site, plagiarism is an ongoing challenge for teachers.

Turnitin.com claims 70% of the papers it receives have no instances of plagiarism at all but that 29% have “significant plagiarism.”

Then there are the students who are either too bold, too lazy or too dumb to do anything but turn in an entire paper that is copied. Fortunately, they make up only 1% of the papers turned in.

When I had a choice in high school, I deliberately chose classes in which the tests and assignments involved a lot of writing. I figured that since I was pretty good at it, I could write my way out of anything. That worked for me and although I cannot recall any specific instance in which I borrowed something from another writer, I cannot honestly tell you it never happened.

More important, however, is that back in those days, unless a student was dumb enough to lift something from, say, “Mark Twain,” the chances of a teacher recognizing something from an unattributed source were slim to none.

Turnitin.com is another check that kids need, if for no other reason than to let them know that someone is watching.

STEVE SMITH is a Costa Mesa resident and a freelance writer. Send story ideas to dailypilot@latimes.com.