Electronic Journal
Classroom Interactions
Fall 2005
You will be keeping an online journal of your field experiences this semester. You will be required to post in your journal at least once each week, and to read and comment on the journal entries of your classmates. We will be using a free online journal service called Greatest Journal for this purpose.
• Create a journal here: http://www.greatestjournal.com/create.bml . Please choose a user name that reflects your actual name as much as possible, for ease of grading and identification by your classmates. After your journal has been created, you may modify its appearance in any way you wish.
• When you have created your journal, go to the appropriate post ( 12:30 section: http://www.greatestjournal.com/users/drjennsmith/490.html , 2:00 section: http://www.greatestjournal.com/users/drjennsmith/573.html ) on my journal and leave a comment there with your name. You should add my journal and your classmates' journals as “friends”. There are two ways to do this:
• Beside each user name is a small icon of a person: 
. Click on that to be taken to that user's information page. (You can also click on the user name to be taken to that person's journal. There, you can click on the “User Info” button.) At the top of this page is a series of buttons, one of which is a “+” sign with this same icon: 
. Clicking it will add the user to your “friends” list.
• Go to your own user info page. On the left under “Your settings”, click on “your friends”. On the page that appears, you can type in the user names of the people you wish to add, and then click “save changes”.
• Be sure to add me (drjennsmith) and Sera (serayoo) to your "friends" lists.
• You are required to post in your journal at least once a week during the semester. Some of these posts will be open-ended, but you will occasionally be asked to post about a particular topic related to your field experience. You are free and encouraged to post more often than once a week. (See the Assignments handout for more information.)
• Privacy: We will be “locking” all of our posts so that only people in our class will be able to read them. Whenever you post in your own journal, you will have several security options:
• Private: no one but you will be able to see the entry
• Friends: everyone in the class will be able to see your entry
• Instructors: Only the instructor and the TA will be able to see the entry (you will be shown how to set this up in class).
• Public: anyone can read your post. Please use only for non-course-related posts.
• You are encouraged to comment on your classmates' journal entries. Once you have added your classmates' journals to your “friends” list, you may view them conveniently on one page by clicking on the “Friends” button on your journal.
• Class discussion community: You should also join the discussion community for your section. Details and a link are provided on the posts given above. You will be assigned a class day for which you will be responsible for posting a summary of what was discussed in class that day and a question for further discussion. You should make this post in the community on the same day as your assigned class was held.
• Participation in community discussions: You are required to participate in at least one of the community discussions each week. Participation means responding thoughtfully to the posted question or to a classmate's response. Extra participation in class discussions will be counted toward your classroom participation grade.
Guidelines for posting your entries: You will be required to post in your journal at least once each week. (See the Assignments handout for more details of specific required posts.)
• Subject lines: Please label your required posts with the appropriate subject line; i.e., Journal Entry 5, Class Summary 9/29.
• Length: Most of your posts should be at least 1000 words in length. I highly recommend that you compose your posts in a word processor and then copy and paste the text into the update form. Please place most of the text of your post behind a "cut" and use html tags to format. (See html tips below).
• Security: Your required journal entries should be locked to "friends" or to the instructors. You can choose which level of security is most comfortable for you. Your posts in the class discussion community should be locked to "friends".
HTML Tips
• To make text bold: <b> place text here </b>
• To italicize: <i> place text here <i>
• To "cut" text: <lj-cut>place text here</lj-cut>
• To link to another web page: <a href="place complete web address here">name of web page</a>
• A list of html codes for symbols can be found here: http://www.avenue-it.com/html/extracharacters.html