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The Sky Is Not Falling: Turnitin Urges Educators to 'Meet the Moment' of ChatGPT

  • By Kristal Kuykendall
  • 03/27/23

In this episode of THE Journal Insider podcast, host and THEJournal.com editor Kristal Kuykendall welcomes two former teachers who have been working on AI writing tools at Turnitin, a plagiarism-detection software used by thousands of K–12 schools and institutions of higher education. 

Turnitin is expected to launch a new AI writing detector and additional related features for educators in the next few weeks. 

David Adamson, principal machine learning scientist at Turnitin, and Patti West-Smith, senior director of customer engagement, have been working on Turnitin’s AI writing detection feature and related new tools to help educators better understand ChatGPT — and to show teachers how to use AI to save themselves time and how to tweak assignments so that ChatGPT cannot earn a good grade on writing homework.

Adamson, who taught computer science and math at Digital Harbor High in Baltimore, and West-Smith, who worked in public schools for 19 years as a teacher, curriculum supervisor, and principal, both believe that ChatGPT has presented a growth opportunity — or perhaps more of a growth demand — for writing instruction, which they explained at length in the newest episode of THE Journal Insider podcast. Adamson also gave a sneak peek into how the new AI writing detector tool works, shown below.

Read excerpts of that discussion in our extended article, Turnitin Believes ChatGPT Could Actually Boost Students' Writing Skills. 

THE Journal Insider podcast explores current ed tech trends and issues impacting K–12 educators, IT professionals, instructional technologists, education leaders, and ed tech providers. Listen in as THE Journal Editor Kristal Kuykendall chats with ed tech experts, educators, and industry leaders about how they are 'meeting the moment' in the U.S. public education system. Find all podcast episodes as well as K–12 ed tech news updated daily at THEJournal.com.

Resource links:

Music by LemonMusicStudio from Pixabay

About the Author

Kristal Kuykendall is editor, 1105 Media Education Group. She can be reached at [email protected].


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