Journal Problem

In my CCENT class, I require my students to write a journal.  This isn't a big assignment, but it gives my students a chance to tell me how things are going.  While I don't use this in my other classes, I've found it very helpful in this one.  In order to get students to do this, I like giving them a few points.

I haven't found a good way to do this in D2L.  In Blackboard, we had a Journal tool in the Discussion area which allowed for private conversations which were graded.  At the beginning of the semester, I thought I would just use an anonymous discussion and it would work.  The problem is, students can't see any posts (even theirs or mine) unless I release them to the entire class.  This defeats the purpose of the exercise.

The logical choice would be to use "Journal".  There's one major drawback.  Students can't see my comments and I can't see theirs.  Unless I'm missing something major, this isn't really an interactive journal.

So, since I needed some advice, I went to my D2L mentor.  Carol understood the problem, but didn't have a great answer either.  She recommended I use the D2L email for the journals.  I really don't care for the email in D2L, especially for assignments, so I didn't want to do that.  The Dropbox is the next solution I looked at, but bouncing ideas back and forth can become burdensome. 

My solution, for the time being, is to add a one question quiz to each Unit.  This question will be manually graded and can be taken as many times as the student wishes before the due date.  I don't like the word "Quizzes" because I'm not after a specific answer, but it's an empty area of the course to use where we can interact for a grade.

Anybody else have an idea?  (I'll keep you posted on whether I find a good solution.)