The Journal activity allows instructors to collect online text from students, review it and provide feedback and/or grades. Student work is visible only to the teacher and not to the other students. Journals are available for set amounts of time and can be modified based on feedback. Forum grading is not available.
The Journal activity is a simple tool that is easy to use but limited in functionality compared to Assignments or Forums. It is probably best suited to frequent, informal, or low-stakes writing or reflections
Add a Journal Activity
1. On your Moodle course, click Turn editing on.
2. Click +Add an activity or resource in the section where you want to add the Journal activity.
3. In the Add an activity or resource window, select Journal. The Adding a new Journal page will open.
4. On the Adding a new Journal page,
- enter a name for the activity in the Journal name filed
- add a question or prompt in the Journal question field (This is what your students will be responding to with their writing).
- configure Days available: This setting will determine the period of time that students are able to add or edit a journal entry.
5. Under Grade section, enter Maximum grade of the Journal activity (by default, each journal will be a 100-point).
Note: If you want the students work to be ungraded, change the Type setting from Point to None.
6. Click Save and return to course button at the bottom of the page to return to the main course page.
Grade a Journal Activity
Once your students have added some writing to the Journal, you can read and give feedback or grades.
1. On your Moodle main page, click on the Journal activity to open it.
2. Click View # journal entries at top-right (# is the number of submitted responses) to view journal entries.
3. On the view journal entries page, you will be able to see all student entries and provide a grade and/or written feedback.
Note: This is a simple feedback text-form and does not allow rich text formatting, so you cannot add images, links, video clips, etc (this is a limitation of the Journal activity compared to other tools).
Additionally, all submissions are displayed on the same screen – there is no way to view student entries individually. When adding feedback for multiple students, please make sure to click the Save All My Feedback button often to avoid losing work. Students can revise based on feedback as long as the Journal is available.
