Feature one: Security within Penzu. The privacy and security features on Penzu are pretty high. Not only are your entries secure with a password for your account but you can have password protection each entry. This feature gives more ownership to an individual's entries.
Feature two: Startup on Penzu. Sometimes the main thing that prevents us from using a program is just the process to get started with it. After you complete a simple sign up for Penzu Free and go to penzu.com it opens straight into the journal entry page. Below you can see the home screen of Penzu after registration. Everything is ready to go, you can get much better then that!
Feature three: Saving entries on Penzu. Penzu auto-saves your entries. Sometimes you can write an entry you can get distracted. You can have peace of mind that your entry will still be there for you to complete later or that it will be logged and saved for review.
Earlier this year I was inspired from a speaker that I heard at a conference and I feel this tool really could have been useful. I was interested in having the girls on my hall refocus on the positive things in their lives and create gratitude journals. Every morning they would spend about 30 seconds to 1 minute and record five things they are thankful for. I was thinking it was going to be a pain to find the time and go to the store and find 25 journals. Now I know this can be really easy implement with Penzu. The girls can use their school laptops and journal away. What a wonderful find!
This seems like a great tool, and I am thinking of implementing it in my class next year. Every Friday, my students have silent reading for about 40 minutes. After they finish reading a book of choice, they have to complete a journal entry using reading strategies. First, they write a short summary of what they read, then they must write another paragraph using specific strategies..(what was important, what they wondered or thought about, any predictions they might have, what it may have reminded them of, or what they liked or didn't like.) We have a mobile lab (a class set of laptops that we can bring to our room) that I could have set up for them to journal in on Fridays. I may try it out and see if they enjoy it more. Thanks for sharing.
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ReplyDeleteThis tool would be very useful to me. Every year I feel like we waste money and paper on composition notebooks that get thrown away and/or not fully used. With an online journal like this students can use it when needed. We often as Diane mentioned use this for talking about what they read and we use journals for Do Nows as well. I will definitely be implementing this into my classroom to make it more engaging to use journals! Thanks Kimberly!
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