Journal for reflective writing assignments (instructor annotates and uses to prepare mini-lectures)?

Journal for reflective writing assignments (instructor annotates and uses to prepare mini-lectures)?

by Cris Fuhrman -
Number of replies: 0

I'm trying to find the best way in Moodle I can do the following:

  • For each of the assigned readings (perhaps more than 25 in a semester) ask students to submit a reflective writing assignment.
  • Deadline is something like three hours before my course, and I will use their contributions to prepare mini-lectures. 
  • Grading is simple (if they submit something reasonable, they get full credit). I only take marks off if they submit reading summaries (paraphrasing the content of what was read, not personal, not reflective).
  • For the purpose of my mini-lecture preparation, I want to annotate their submissions, e.g., with comments on passages such as one can do in Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Adobe Acrobat, etc. I don't want to do this on hard copy in 2015.
  • I'd like to be able to generate a word cloud using the content.
  • I could have up to 40 students in two sections (80 students total) and I don't have a secretary to help me click!

Looking at the Journal activity in Moodle, I think it comes up short on the annotation feature (at least based on the documentation I looked at, there seems to only be a form field for instructor feedback and a grade). 

I'm thinking of going with Assignments (there's bulk download of Word/PDF/etc.) documents although a Word cloud wouldn't be possible (that's not a show stopper).

I'd appreciate feedback from the Moodle community regarding this approach. Thanks!

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