Teaching with Technology: Assignment: Course Journal Entry
This post is part of a series that comprise my Penn State Teaching with Technology (TWT) Portfolio. More information on TWT and links to each of these posts can be found at this hub page.
Teaching with Technology Rubric Item: Pedagogical Innovation with Technology
A pedagogical innovation with technology that I am most interested in developing further is the use of a Microsoft Office shared document as what I’ve referred to as a “Course Journal.” This is my twist on low-stakes writing assignments like discussion board posts and blog posts. Each student is assigned one week that they will “cover” by writing an entry that they will discuss the following Monday. The entry includes a summary of previous class meetings, a 500-word “mini essay” on a relevant topic of their choosing, and two discussion questions.
By the end of the course, the journal captures not only summaries of each week’s class discussions, but also, ideally, something of the opinions, arguments, and perspectives of each class member for the week that they have covered. While discussion board postsserve some of these functions, I do not assume students are likely to thoroughly read all of their classmate’s posts before a class meeting.
By spotlighting one student and giving them the authority to pose questions that will drive part of our discussion, I hope to give students a sense of ownership over the ideas they have discussed and the conversations that will follow.
At the end of the course, I assemble this document and the course syllabus into a single, bookmarked PDF file that I email to the class. This way, in addition to their personal notes, they have a document that registers the collective body of knowledge they have produced with their peers.
Below is a sample assignment sheet for this project as I used it in my Spring 2024 Asian American Literatures course. In the future, I will improve it by doing the following:
Giving students the option to summarize the previous week’s class meetings (earning a B grade for that criteria item) or directly quoting a comment of a classmate and responding to it (earning an A). The summaries tend to be pretty cursory, and this may incentivize more direct engagement with peers’ in-class comments.
Provide options for a non-essay style entry. This might include an infographic, a mind-map, or other visual or video work. When I use the term “essay,” it creates a reasonably clear expectation, but I would also like students to feel welcome to experiment in this space.
Course Journal Entry
Every week, different class members will write entries in the course journal (a shared Microsoft 365 document). Those class members will be excused from that week’s Canvas post.
This will include three parts:
A two- to three-sentence summary of our class meetings over the past week.
A 500-word mini-essay that responds to one of the questions or issues discussed in the course. These can be drawn from last week’s course journal entry or from a question or comment from the previous class meetings.
Two questions for discussion.
On the day that the entry is due, you will give a brief presentation that summarizes your entry and facilitate a discussion with the questions you’ve written.
In this way, the journal will document a continuous chain of knowledge building from the beginning of the class to its end, with each class member forging a link.
Entries will be assessed according to this rubric within a week of their completion.