Why Use Blackboard: Sending Email Via Blackboard

You can use Blackboard's Announcement feature to post announcements to your class, which the students will see when they log in to Blackboard and access your course. If you have a crucial message to send to your students, or if you want to limit your audience to a particular group or groups of students in your course, you can use Blackboard's Send Email feature to send that message to its targeted audience. Your message will go to the students' Bucknell email addresses, which are associated with their Blackboard accounts. Selections for the recipient of your message include All Users, All Groups, All Student Users, All Teaching Assistant Users, All Instructor Users, All Observer Users, Single/Select Users, Single/Select Groups, and Single/Select Observers. Those recipient choices pertain to the particular course from which you use the "Send Email" feature: in other words, all users in this course or select users in the course (specified by clicking in check boxes next to student names), all groups in the course or groups that you select, etc. When you choose "All Users," for example, Blackboard creates the list of recipients from the list of people enrolled in your course. You need to type only the Subject and the Message, and Blackboard sends the message via the campus email server to all the students on the list. This saves you from needing to type all those names into the "To" field of a message or to create an email distribution list for your course; Blackboard does the work for you. Blackboard also sends you a copy of the message, so you can see what you sent.

Since you're composing the message via Blackboard and not via your email program, you can't look in a "Sent Mail" folder for a history of what you've sent to your class in this way. If you want to keep track of messages you've sent via Blackboard, we recommend that you keep the copy of your message that you receive in your own email inbox. Announcements, on the other hand, are kept with the course, so we recommend that you use the Announcement feature more extensively to communicate with your students, using "Send EMail" only for essential or targeted messages that you want to push to the students, assuming that they actually check their Bucknell email accounts.

For instructions on how to use Blackboard's "Send Email" feature, see Sending EMail via Blackboard.

Written by Leslie Harris, originally for the Office of Instructional Technology at the University of Scranton. Revised with permission and adapted to the Bucknell University Blackboard environment. Last revised August 12, 2008.  Please send questions or comments to itec@bucknell.edu.