How do I set up a reflective journal for students?
This answer will tell you how to create a group for each individual student, with their own discussion board that they can use as a reflective journal.
Answer
If you want to give students the opportunity to keep a reflective journal that can only be seen by themselves and by lecturers, the solution is to create groups consisting of individual students. You can then give each student their own discussion topic, which they can use to reflect on their learning.
Brightspace makes this very easy to do. You can set this up for all of the students in your module within a few clicks.
- Within the Brightspace module in which you want to do this, select ‘Communications’ from the navbar.
- Select ‘groups’
- Select ‘New category’
- Input the name of the category and a description of what these groups will be for.
- Under ‘enrolment type’, choose ‘Single user, member-specific groups’
- Under ‘Additional options’, tick the box to ‘Set up discussion areas’.
- If you have not already created a Discussion Forum (which is a category for discussion topics), it will prompt you to do so here.
- Select ‘save’.
- You then have to choose an option for your discussions. You can either choose one topic per group, or one thread (within the same topic) by group. The former allows for a more multi-layered conversation, whereas the latter is more like one initial post with all replies being comments on that post.
- Select ‘Create and next’