Plagiarism Checker

I often get asked by teachers how they can check for plagiarism in a Google Doc, specifically looking for a block of text that may have been copied and pasted into a document. My recommendation is Revision History. When a person is an editor on a document, they can click on "file", then, in the dropdown menu, "see revision history". In this way the teacher can see the document being created step-by-step.

Recently I have learned of an extension called Draftback that adds additional features to Google's revision history. Draftback lets you play back the revision history of any Google Doc you can edit. It's like going back in time to look over a student's shoulder as they write.

Draftback turns Revision History into a "movie" that you can watch, either in real-time, or in time-lapse. You can also save the movie for future reference. If you notice in the "movie" that an entire paragraph appears all at once, chances are it has been copied and pasted into the document.

After installing the Draftback extension, you will notice a box at the top of all your documents with the number of revisions made in that document.

When you click on that box, it will render a "movie" of all the revisions made to the document.

Click on the "document graphs and statistics" link in the upper right for more information regarding the creation of the document including the number of writing sessions and amount of time spent on the document.