 Hi, I'm Justina Brown and I'm here to tell you about discussion boards and how they can be used a little differently for open reflections, perhaps for a reading journal assignment that's associated with a weekly reading and that you have provided questions or prompts to encourage reflective responses. And because it's in the discussion board, it's open for everyone in the class to see. Sometimes this helps encourage a certain kind of response from everybody and they learn from each other. I've also attached a simple rubric and the purpose of this is to really encourage accountability and get students prepared for a follow-up discussion. So I'll pop over here to Canvas and I'm in my discussions area. I already have a few journal prompts set up due each Friday. I'll go into journal prompt number one. My instructions are clear that everyone in the class will see each other's posts. There's two prompts for them to respond to and I have two replies right here, actually I have three. And so we will go ahead and look at the settings for that under edit. I've allowed threaded replies even though I don't require replies and it is a graded assignment so there's points that will go into the gradebook once it's complete and graded and give it a due date and hit safe. Just like assignments, you can't adjust a rubric from within the edit settings. You need to do that outside of that. And here in a discussion it's under the three dot option menu. If you don't have a rubric you would, this would say add rubric. Now it says show so we can look at it and I'll make that bigger so we can see. This is graded on timeliness because it needs to be on time for a good discussion to happen afterwards. It is something that has good connections to real life and other course topics and it's informative so that we can make sure that we're adding to the discussion something new and interesting. Okay so now let's see how it looks when I grade it. Also from that menu I can access the speed grader. In this view of a discussion board I can see that my test student didn't do a very good job. They gave me their grocery list so when I view the test students rubric I'm probably not going to, well it was on time but let's say the connections are lacking and contributes no new ideas, connections or applications and when I hit save that grade is going directly into the grade book. You'll need to make sure that the rubric does have the check box on it that says that this discussion board should be attached to a grade and put into the grade book. So if I were go to the other students in the class I could also look at the rubric and put some grades in based on how I feel about the post and hit save. If I feel like responding to that person outside of the discussion board I can put a comment here and I'm done. So that's as simple as it is. Discussion boards as open reflections for reading journals.