Electronic Journal Writing for Student Teachers

AbstractReflective journals enhance the quality of the student-teaching experience. Electronic journals enhance the maintenance of reflective journals by facilitating the transfer of information and searching of journal entries for common text. In this article Student Journal, an electronic writing tool for journals, is described. It uses the Macintosh application, HyperCard. This tool includes many features to facilitate journal keeping, including some that help supervising teachers (such as automatic timing while recording observations and differentiating text by changing type fonts). Separate journal categories are available for student teachers, cooperating teachers, and supervising teachers. Searching journals for thematic text strings such as names of particular students or characteristic descriptors and printing selected journals for review are easy matters. This article presents samples of student writing from an electronic journal together with an analysis and discussion of those entries.