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Goals & Objectives:
The core components of journaling objectives include but are not limited
to:
- Journals focus students
- Journals help develop the instructor-student relationship
- Journals enhance interactivity
- Journals can reduce student isolation
- Journals built intrapersonal skills
- Journals motivate for the building of writing skills
- Journals may be used simply to improve student writing ability too
Prerequisites:
None.
Materials and Resources:
What needs to be prepared in advance by the teacher? The instructor will
need to provide a program to journaling software.
What does the student need to bring to the lesson? An openness to share
through journaling
Guiding Questions for this Activity:
What do the students feel, comprehend, and have an ability to articulate
about the given topic? How do these feelings, comprehensions, and abilities
change as the journal progresses?
Activity Outline and Procedure:
- The journal activity is initially described within the syllabus with appropriate
assessment information and purpose.
- An appropriate forum or program is provided or required to be accessed
by the students where they can submit their journal entries. Preferably,
this program will allow the journal to be added to, rather than a new independent
post being required for each journal entry.
- Within the same journal preferably, the instructor provides continual
feedback to the student regarding journaling activity and content.
- An assessment of some form is linked to the journal. The points can be
supplied as the journal progresses or at the end.
- The instructor may use journal comments to modify instruction as well.
Teaching Strategies:
- Start the journal early to help foster a relationship between the student
and instructor.
- Provide immediate feedback, and make the feedback pertinent, otherwise,
the students will not make their posts pertinent.
- Provide some form of credit for completing the activity.
- Provide questions that students can address in their journals.
Accommodations:
What accommodations may be needed for students with disabilities or other
special needs? Probably none. Most disabilities have technology allowing
text entry; however, any software used should be appropriately tested.
Timeline:
While an individual journal entry may only take 10 to 20 minutes to compose,
the activity usually continues throughout a semester.
Ideas for Activity Evaluation and Teacher Reflection:
End of semester evaluations should ask about the usefulness and learning
accomplished through such activities. Also, the responses in the forum will
help guage how the students are enjoying various aspects of the activity.
Each required journal entry can be assessed or the journal as a whole can
be assessed summatively, however, continual formative assessment of the journal
cna be considered more effective.
Additional Readings:
Here is a brief listing to get you started reading more about educational
journaling.
- Blake, T. K. (2005). Journaling: An active learning
technique. [Article 7] International Journal of Nursing Education
Scholarship, 2(1). Retrieved January 17, 2007, from http://www.bepress.com/ijnes/vol2/iss1/art7/
- Dunlap, J. C. (2006, November). Using guided reflective journaling activities
to capture students' changing perceptions. TechTrends, 50(6).
pp. 20-26.
- Dyment, J. E., & O'Connell, T. S. (2003). Journal writing in
experiential education: Possibilities, problems, and recommendations. (ERIC
Document Reproduction Service No. ED 479358). Retrieved January 17, 2007,
from http://www.ericdigests.org/2005-2/journal.html
- Hopkins, G. (1999). Journal writing every day: Teachers say it really
works! Retrieved January 17, 2007, from Education World Website at
http://www.education-world.com/a_curr/curr144.shtml
- Journaling & writing. (2006).
Retrieved January 17, 2007, from the The Walden Woods Project Website
at http://www.walden.org/education/TWS/Resources/journaling_and_writing.htm
- Phipps, J. J. (2005). E-Journaling: Achieving interactive
education online. Educause Quarterly, 28 (1). pp. 62-65. Retrieved
January 17, 2007, from http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/EQM0519.pdf
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