Even with many educators now nearly as tech-savvy as their students, local teachers still report rampant plagiarism.

Several Seattle-area schools and districts offer secondary teachers access to Turnitin, a professional anti-plagiarism Web site (www.turnitin.com). Students submit papers directly to the site, which checks the writing against the Internet, ProQuest articles and millions of student papers. The site then provides a report highlighting any duplication.

After piloting the service districtwide last year, the Lake Washington School District signed a two-year agreement with Turnitin this month for all its junior and high schools, said Chip Kimball, the district's assistant superintendent and chief information officer.

Kimball didn't want to release the exact monetary figure, but said the district paid less than the standard annual rate of $1 per child for its 12,000 secondary students.

"We're a community that believes heavily in technology," Kimball said. "We think the benefits outweigh the detriments, but it would be naive of us not to recognize both. Just the fact we have this tool in itself prevents plagiarism."

Dave Sudmeier, a history teacher at Redmond Junior High School, believes most students don't deliberately cheat. "More often, kids don't understand what plagiarism is," he said.

He requires seventh-graders to submit papers to Turnitin, but students see the results first, without penalty. "That way, they learn where they crossed the line and need attribution," he said. "We don't want to just throw them to the dogs; we want to take them through the learning process."

By ninth grade, the anti-plagiarism reports go directly to teachers, he said.

Even without Turnitin, teachers say Google searches and their own knowledge help catch cheaters.

Nearly every paper Lis Christiansen assigns brings an attempted plagiarism, said the Lake Washington High School English and writing teacher. "Sometimes they don't bother to change the different fonts or they'll forget to take off the URL because they're in a hurry," she said. "That's a huge tip-off."

When the Pew Internet & American Life Project looked at a sampling of 100 sites labeling themselves as "homework help," it found almost a third dealt with buying, selling or sharing essays or term papers.

One in 10 high-schoolers confessed to submitting a report from an online term-paper mill, according to a survey by Don McCabe, a professor at Rutgers Business School in New Jersey.

At Northwood Middle School in Kent, English teacher Sara Dacus says students are shocked when she's able to tell they've cut and pasted. "It's pretty obvious," she said. "They're savvy about using the computer but naive about the results. They'll say, 'What do you mean it doesn't sound like my writing?' "

That holds true even in her honors classes. "The best and the brightest try to get out of as much as they can, too," Dacus said.

Taigen Riggs, a math teacher at Seattle's Washington Middle School, told his students not to cut and paste while they were writing a paper on Galileo. "I say that knowing full well that's what they're going to do," he said. "They think they're going to get away with cut-and-paste instead of actually thinking about what's required of them."

When he uses Google to catch as many as 90 percent of students cheating on a draft, he tells them they just wasted their time. They have to redo the paper, using their own words. But first, he says, "I have to convince them I can expose them in a heartbeat."