Student Rollout Email - Scholar Wiki

SAMPLE EMAIL COMMUNICATION FOR STUDENTS - cut and paste in an email to your students to get them started!

Dear Students,

Check it out! Recently, we rolled out a new tool to help you in your everyday studies and research.

Introducing Scholar

Scholar, the first property from the Blackboard Beyond Initiative, is a free social bookmarking site, customized for education, and integrated with the Blackboard Learning System™ products. Built on the principles of Web 2.0, Scholar provides you with an exciting new way find educationally valuable resources on the web and use them in your everyday studies.

What is Social Bookmarking All About?

Social bookmarking offers an increasingly popular way to find, save, classify, evaluate and share Internet resources. Users can save or "bookmark" favorite Web sites and classify, or "tag", them anyway that works for them. Their bookmarks are then added not only to their personal list, but also to the overall repository where others can see them. (That's the "social" part.). Students and instructors can then use each other's classifications, as well as any of the other information they now have on those resources (who saved it, how many people saved it, etc.) to evaluate and find what they are looking for.

Why is This Important to Me?

Practically every student and instructor around the world does web research as part of their academic work. They might look for resources for a particular course or assignment, or for research in their discipline or specialty. But the deluge of information from the Web can make it very difficult to quickly and easily find educationally valuable sites, or to keep track of the resources that you've already reviewed and vetted. Scholar offers a solution to these challenges, by allowing you to:

STORE bookmarks in a central online service for anytime, anyplace access
CLASSIFY bookmarks via user-defined tagging (aka "folksonomies") to organize and make them easier to find
SHARE resources among peers and colleagues
DISCOVER relevant, reliable resources more easily
EVALUATE the quality of the resources based on other users who have tagged, tags, popularity, etc.
GET dynamic content streams and Scholar resources right in line with Course materials.
CONTRIBUTE yourself to course collections

Best of all you get to take these resources with you, after you finish your program. Your account remains accessible on http://www.scholar.com, free for life!

How Can I Get Access to Scholar?

It's a click away! Just click on the new Scholar tab in Blackboard and create your account! It's really that easy!

After you have created your account, you may want to follow these quick and easy steps to start building your collection and using Scholar in your courses:

Set up the Scholar Bookmarklet - this allows you to add websites to y our Scholar collection as you find them, with one click from your browser. (For more info - visit Installing and Using the Scholar Bookmarklet)
Import your existing bookmarks from your browser or another social bookmarking service. (For more info - visit Importing Bookmarks)
Start sharing and using Scholar resources in your studies and courses! (For more info - visit Adding to Course Collections - for Students)

Prefer a graphical approach to getting started? (For more info - visit How To Get Started 1-2-3)

Want to learn more? Find helpful hints and How To's on the Scholar Wiki (http://wiki.scholar.com) or visit www.scholar.com to test drive the public site.

Go forth and Scholar!

>>View Faculty Version