Digital Journals

Let's be honest - English teachers know that journaling is highly beneficial to their students. It encourages independent thinking and develops writing skills. However, sometimes the process itself can be extremely painful. Training students in how to journal and what to journal is a tedious process, and if and when you are successful in that endeavor, journals begin to fall apart or are lost. If the journals miraculously make it to the point of being checked, you have to find time to stay at school long enough to grade all of them, or you become the cart-lady teacher rolling them all home to grade in misery late at night. At this point, both you and your students are fed up with the entire process.

I think I have found a solution to the problem...a digital journal. We are eight weeks into the school year, and both my students and myself aren't hating the process yet. I consider that a win!! To make this possible, I use the Table of contents option under Insert in Google Docs. There are a few steps in the process, but they are easy to understand and after doing it a couple of times, my students found it to be a piece of cake.

First, create a new Google doc and name it Journal. Then insert a Table of Contents under the Insert tab.

You should see a textbox with a refresh icon.  Remember this refresh icon, it will come in handy in just a few minutes.

Now it is time to start journaling. Each journal title should be a Heading 1. 

The body of each journal entry should be normal text. 

When the journal entry is finished, return to the Table of Contents box at the top of the document and press the refresh icon. The journal entry will appear as a hyperlink item in the Table of Contents.

And it really is that simple.

Because I use Google Classroom, my students add the hyperlink to a specific journal entry to an assignment in Classroom when I am ready to do a check, but the sky is the limit as to how YOU can use this handy trick. I have yet to have a student lose or break a journal, and I am not the teacher wheeling all her journals home in misery while at the same time, my students are getting all the benefits of journaling!!

If you are someone who likes to see it in action, here is a video from the Gooru that gives you the basic idea. He is using the process in a longer paper rather than a journal, but the general principle is still the same.