 Hi, my name is Kurt Pavia and I'm Learning Technologist with the Libraries at Western. I'm just going to take a minute here to show you the setup for using a discussion forum as a private journal. Now you may ask students to write journal entries as an assignment. When a student submits an assignment as a normal assignment, they only get to see their most recent submission. They don't get to see all the previous submissions that they've had. So another way to do it is to set up a discussion board for the student where they can post their journal entry as a discussion item and then when they go back and post their next journal entry, they can see their previous entries and their whole history and see their journal. But how to keep that private between you and the student? Well, the way to do that is to use groups. So what you do is you go to the people tab first and in the people tab you'll set up a discussion or I'm sorry a group set for private journals. And then from there you'll create a separate group for each student. Now if you want to do that automatically, you can have Canvas create it and you just enter in the number of groups is equal to the number of students and it'll put one student in each group. Boom, it's done. But once this is set up, then you can go to your discussions and you can create your discussion and assign it as a group. And here you can see that the students are all assigned to their own group. And so when they come to it, they're only going to see their own posts. They won't see any other students posts and it's their own little private journal. A couple of notes in here when you do set this up is that you need to allow threaded replies of course and turn on grading that allows you to make it a group discussion and set it to your private journals group. And then you can get the points in there and such and save it. And one other thing I want to point out to you and this might be helpful in your other Canvas assignments with discussions, is that if you go to the course details of your class and you go way to the bottom there's more options. If you click on more options, you'll see there's let students attach files to discussions. That's helpful usually if they need to attach a file. This one here let students edit or delete their own discussion posts. Now that's one that's left up to you to decide. Students could go in there make a post and then just type in something simple and then come back and edit it three days later. Who knows? Usually that's a way to escape deadlines and things, but you can choose to turn that off to where students can't go back and edit their post. That's kind of your own personal decision and you have to look at the pros and cons of that. Anyhow, that's just a way to set up a private journal using discussions. Thanks and I hope you have a good day.