Journals within the Classroom

   Looking back, I never really enjoyed writing in journals when I was in school. To me it was just busy work to give the teachers some extra time to do something that they needed to do. I didn't really see the point of it at the time. However, as a future teacher and with the amount of education that I have received since then, I now have a totally different prospective on journal writing. 

   When I get my own classroom someday, I definitely want to incorporate journal writing in my daily instruction. I plan to use a variety of journal writing methods: personal journals, dialogue journals, and depending on the grade level I am teaching I may introduce digital journals, like wikis or blogs. I feel like each of these types of journals have many advantages that I would like to have in my classroom. 

 

   By using personal journals or dialogue journals, it allows the student the freedom to write about anything that they want, as long as the teacher doesn't give the students a specific topic to write about. The students know that anything they say in their journals stay between the teacher and the student, so they are free to say whatever they want or feel. With dialogue journals, teachers can write back and fourth to the student and they are able to have an ongoing conversation. It is also a way for the teacher to get to know the student better and create a personal trusting relationship with the student. There are a lot of kids out there that don't have many people to talk to or feel safe talking to nowadays, so it is important to me to incorporate these journals into my classroom so that my students will be able to talk to me about things that they are normally would not talk about. 

   If I ever taught in the upper grades, I would want to have them use wikis or blogs as their journals. I would want to be able to assign work that they would have to do on their own at home. I would expect my students to read their peers writing and comment on it and give them ideas on how they could make their writing even better. In the upper grade levels, I find collaboration with peers to be very important and for me wikis and blogs are a way to make that happen in any classroom. It also allows me to revise or interact with my students while at home and it saves time spent meeting with students face-to-face,which can be very time consuming. 

   Written journals and digital journals both have their advantages and disadvantages for everyone, but for me they are most definitely something that I plan and want to incorporate in my classroom someday. Funny how the years and knowledge helped to change the way I felt about journals!