<\/a><\/div>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.niu.edu\/blackboard\/images\/safeassignlogo.jpg\")
<\/a>The Safe Assign feature on Blackboard is great for detecting and deterring plagiarism. But I\u2019m finding an additional use fot it in teaching freshman core writing courses. If you teach a course in which students have to submit a draft, get feedback (and perhaps a grade) on the draft, and then revise the essay and submit it again, Safe Assign will\u00a0give a \u201cfalse positive\u201d of a high likelihood or certainty of plagiarism, because it will match that assignment against the student\u2019s earlier one, assuming both were submitted through Safe Assign. This will in fact allow you to highlight everything that is the same in both papers, providing a helpful visual indication of what has stayed the same, and what, if anything, has been changed between the first draft and the final version. I find this a very useful function of Safe Assign, even though it presumably isn\u2019t what it was designed for. And I thought that other educators might find this a useful tip. If you do, let me know!<\/p>\n