ChurchofJesusChrist.org Tool Enhances Gospel Study Online
“The purpose of the notebook is to help members learn, live, and share the gospel online.” —Lee Gibbons, director of ChurchofJesusChrist.org
My Study Notebook, an online study tool on ChurchofJesusChrist.org, was enhanced at the end of April. The latest version allows users to print out their Study Notebook as well as export it to Microsoft Word and XML.
My Study Notebook enables members to highlight passages of interest on ChurchofJesusChrist.org—scriptures, magazine articles, lessons, manuals, and conference addresses—add notes, and save it all to a personal, private place.
“The purpose of the notebook is to help members learn, live, and share the gospel online,” said Lee Gibbons, director of ChurchofJesusChrist.org. “People can interact with the content and study while they’re online.”
As the presence and usability of My Study Notebook has expanded, so has its popularity. By April, users had logged more than one million annotations using the new tool. About 200,000 new annotations are added each month.
The one-million-annotations mark does not include those made on mobile devices. Later this year sync capabilities will be added, which will increase the number of annotations by hundreds of thousands.
My Study Notebook
My Study Notebook is presently located under the “Menu” and “Tools” tabs on the ChurchofJesusChrist.org homepage, but it will eventually be available throughout ChurchofJesusChrist.org, Brother Gibbons said.
As long as an individual is signed into ChurchofJesusChrist.org, these sections will include a black “Save and Share” toolbar at the bottom of the page. This toolbar indicates the ability to mark and organize content from that page.
Users begin by accessing a page on ChurchofJesusChrist.org that is compatible with My Study Notebook. Content may be marked in two ways: Highlighting marks a section of text in color. Bookmarks add entire articles to the Study Notebook and provide a link back to the article online.
My Study Notebook also includes a “journal” feature where users can write down their personal thoughts as they study the content they have selected.
Using My Study Tools
My Study Notebook can be a helpful tool for personal study as well as for preparing lessons or talks. It organizes material by the date it was added. As users collect more content, they can sort it by topic using collections and tags they create themselves.
Suppose, for instance, a member needs to prepare a talk on the sacrament. A general search for “sacrament” on ChurchofJesusChrist.org yields thousands of talks, lesson manuals, scriptures, and magazine articles that mention the subject.
As the member reviews the information, he or she can highlight passages that are especially helpful or relevant. Highlighting a passage causes a pop-up window to appear. Here, users can add a note, label it with a keyword (a tag), and add it to a collection folder for easy future reference.
Changes to the study tool are being made to increase functionality and increase its user-friendliness, Brother Gibbons said.
