You may find yourself in a course with other Instructors/TAs/guests ... and you may wish to send email only to the students in the class. (Or, you might want to set up specific groups for specific purposes.) These steps will illustrate grouping all the students together into one big group, but obviously it could be modified to create smaller groups. [Modified Fall 2005 to include the new "Advanced Group Management".]
Step 1) Go into your course in Blackboard - go to the Control Panel - go to Course Tools - go to ADVANCED GROUP MANAGEMENT.
Step 2)Since we don't have any yet, select ADD GROUP.
Step 3) Pick the group name - You don't have to check any of the optional boxes .. but if you want, you could "Enable Group E-Mail Function" [this would allow students to send mail to others in their group .. useful for teamwork in class, maybe not useful for a group of advisees] and make sure that "visibility" is checked - and submit those changes.
Step 4) Once we have several groups, we have more choices ... if we want to change what is allowed, click whichever group you need to modify and then select the MODIFY group. (Note - we DON'T have to do this now .. unless you made a mistake in the settings. Just, in case you want to change those options - this is how you would do it.
Step 5) Let's add some users ... click the VIEW/ASSIGN USERS button (shown above also).
Step 6) Now, it might be useful to "randomize" the people into groups .. but usually we will want to put them in groups ourselves - so click the MODIFY button.
Step 7) For this example, I've put two students into the "Students" group, and one student and myself into the "Teachers" group. But, notice a few things here ... since I am the instructor .. I will always be able to "get into" any of the group pages ... but, if I'm not "in" the group, I won't get the emails from the group. So, depending on what kind of groups you are setting up, you might just want to put the instructor in all of them. (Also, notice that you can now overlap students in different groups ... I could have had Thomas in both groups if I chose. Once done, click the Submit button (You should get a listing like the previous, but now there are checkmarks to indicate group membership. If you needed to make changes - click Modify and repeat!).
Step 8) Suppose you were a member of the STUDENTS group .. this is what you would see - if you go to COMMUNICATIONS and then GROUP PAGES, you would be able to click on the STUDENTS link, but you could not click on (or access) the TEACHERS link. So, the TEACHERS group could email/file exhange as needed, only amongst themselves.
Student ..... 
Me
....
Step 9) Once you have created the group - you can send an email just to that group or use the File Exchange to post documents only to that group.
Step 10) You can also use the regular Email from Bb and go to COMMUNICATIONS - SEND EMAIL and then choose the SELECT GROUPS choice:
Step 10) Check which groups you wish to use, and compose the email!
Note : If you only create that one group ("All Students"), then there would be exactly the same number of mouse clicks to send mail to All Students instead of All Users - no extra work! (.. that is, once you have created the groups!)
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Last Updated = Thursday, 14-Sep-2006 16:50:22 EDT Of the 3 people that have visited this site, you are the most recent.