Hesitating about using journals?

JOURNALS

Having known that tests are not the only way for assessing, we keep talking about alternatives in assessment.  One of those is journals, thus I want to mention some important aspects about it. 

To start from the very beginning, we need to know that: 

A journal is: 

''A log of one’s thought, feelings, reactions, assessments, ideas, or progress, toward goals, usually written with little attention to structure, form, or correctness''

                 (Brown, D. (2004) Language Assessment Principles and Practices. New York. Pearson Longman)

Having clear the concept of journal, we need to be aware that we have to follow some steps if we want to use journals in our class. 

Those steps are: 

1. Sensitively introduce students to the concept of journal writing.

             2. State the objective(s) of the journal.

             3. Give guidelines on what kinds of topics to include. 

             4. Carefully specify the criteria for assessing or grading journals.

             5. Provide optimal feedback in your responses.

             Following those steps properly, we can make sure that we will obtain good results using a journal.  So, if we go through this process,  there are some basic things we would like to achieve:

             For teachers:

             - It will provide us important information about areas of difficulty. 

            - It will help us to identify students who are having similar problems in order to adjust their plans regarding students’ needs.

            - It will be helpful to us  in establishing the pace of instruction during problem-based learning.

              For students:  

             - It will allow students to express their opinions and comments freely.

             -  Journals will help students to see how far they've come over the course of the project.

            - It will allow students to reflect and evaluate their own progress, using chronological data written by themselves.  

            -  It will help them to self-assess their learning and their learning process.

             To sum up, I bet that if you read the information posted here, you are now thinking about implementing journals in your classes. To that, all I have to say is: Go ahead, forget about the ''easiest'' assessing tools and take the risk of getting though a new path using an effective, functional and rewarding tool.