Thursday, May 31, 2012

MY STUDY NOTEBOOK: A True Gospel Learning Resource



Would you like to remember every insight you have ever had about the Gospel of Jesus Christ?

            There is a wonderful free resource for members and nonmembers of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints alike.  It is called My Study Notebook.  You sign up for your online account at www.lds.org.  On the home page look for the heading called Tools.  Under the drop down menu under Tools you will see My Study Notebook. Click on My Study Notebook, then Register for an Account.  Members can enter all of their church record information. Nonmembers of the church can click the link called, “if you are not a member of the LDS Church please click here to skip this page,” to create an account.

            The best way to learn about My Study Notebook is to experiment.  My Study Notebook allows you to highlight and create a note about anything you learn in the scriptures, church study manuals, and church magazine articles.  You can even create journal entries independent of any source at all.  You can create different journals for different topics, or what I prefer is to have the journals by source: Manuals, Scriptures, Ensign, etc. and then within each journal, you can arrange your highlighted quotes by topics called Tags.  My Tags are the topics: faith, adversity, getting revelation, etc.  You can tag each quote under more than one tag/topic. 

            Through recording what you are learning in this manner, you can create your own topical guide and locate everything you have ever learned.  Besides being able to access your insights for talks, lessons and future mission service, the act of getting your knowledge stored into a database like this will help you to function longer if your memory ever deteriorates.  That is an added benefit!

            Through the phone applications for the scriptures on your phone you can even access your notes away from your computer, on the road or at church, from your phone or ipad.  You can also print by journal or by tag if you want a hard copy of your insights.  Whether you access this information away from your computer or not, it is a wonderful resource. Try it out!  Tell your nonmember friends too, who use the King James Version of the Bible!

PS  Another benefit of reading your scriptures online is that you can easily increase the font size—no Large Print Bible needed.  J  You can also turn off distracting footnotes to just read the scriptures like a story, or turn the footnotes back on to do research! So many wonderful resources are available to increase your understanding of the gospel!