Setting Up YAHOO! Group Accounts

For your hands-on listserv, bulletin board, and chat activities, you will be using Yahoo! Groups, a popular site acquired in June 2000 by Yahoo! Your trainer has set up a Yahoo! Groups site for your course.

HINT: If using this resource in your own classroom, you may want your students to initiate the subscription process themselves. We found it more efficient to obtain participants' email addresses and register them ourselves; this is the procedure used below.

Prior to class time:

1.   Obtain and have handy the email addresses for all participants/students.

NOTE: In a training session, you may wish to set up dummy Yahoo email accounts using generic names (Student 1, Student 2, etc.). Participants can use those dummy accounts during the course.

2.   Go to the Yahoo! Groups website at
http://groups.yahoo.com/

3.   Sign up for membership in Yahoo! Groups.  (NOTE:  If you already have a Yahoo! Mail account, you simply need to follow the link under "Getting Started."  Follow the instructions there.)

4.   Go to your email account and check your mail. You will receive a confirmation from Yahoo! Groups, which contains an authorization number. Follow the Yahoo! Groups directions and complete your registration using that authorization number.

5.   Once your authorization is complete, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com. Click the Start a Group button to create a new group. You will need to give your group a unique name and supply some information about the group. We suggest that you restrict this site for your members only.

6.   The last step of registration asks you to register participants and create a Welcome Message which appears in their invitations:

7.   Use the email addresses of the participants/students to subscribe them to the group, and check the second radio button to directly subscribe members.  Using this approach can save class management time.

NOTE: The default method of sending invitations requires potential users to respond to the invitations before membership becomes active.

8.   When you are through, a congratulatory screen will appear confirming the information about your group, including its web address (for chat and bulletin board) and posting address (for listserv).

Print this page for future reference.

Participants will each receive a welcome message, which will include the name of the group, any personalized note you included, and instructions for using Yahoo! Groups.