The purpose of this article is to take you through the basic steps to creating announcements as well as to explain different settings and best practices for using announcements.
Creating an announcement
Prologue: make sure to follow these steps before creating any announcements
Publish your course--students will not receive your announcements if you course is unpublished.
Please note: If an announcement is scheduled to post before the course start date and the students can only participate in the course between these dates setting is enabled, students will not receive announcement notifications.
Turn on the setting allowing your to enable comments on your announcements.
Click on the settings tab on the left side of your screen.
Scroll down to the bottom and click on “more options”
Uncheck “disable user comments on announcements”
This does not mean that comments will be enabled for all of your announcements. It simply means that you will have the ability to enable comments for individual announcements.
Main text:
Navigate to the announcements tab on the left side of your screen
Click on the “Add announcement” button in the upper right-hand corner of your screen.
Add a title and content to your announcement.
In the content box, you have the option of typing a message, including links, videos, or pictures
Attach a file if you would like.
Please note that you can only attach one file per announcement.
Choose the sections that will receive the announcement.
Please note that the default is for all sections to receive the announcement.
You will then need to address the following options:
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Announcements are listed in reverse chronological order by default, with the most recent announcements appearing first.
New/unread announcements are displayed with a solid blue dot next to them, while read comments have an empty circle.
Each announcement reply has its own options icon.
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If it is a comment on an original post, you will see the following options.
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If it is a comment on a comment, you will have the option of returning to the parent comment.
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Viewing an individual announcement:
In the lower left corner of the announcement, you will see a search bar that you can use to locate specific replies or commenters.
Next to the search bar, you will see an “unread” button. You can use this to filter by unread replies.
Next to the unread button, you will see an eye button, which you can use to show or hide deleted replies.
Next to the eye button, you will see buttons that will allow you to expand or collapse replies.
In the upper right corner, you will see the edit button, which you can use to edit the announcement.
Next to the edit button, you will see the options icon, which you can use to mark all existing posts/replies as read, delete the announcement, and/or close the announcement for comments.
Below the edit and options button, you will see two numbers: the left number indicates the number of unread comments and the right number indicates the total number of comments.
Related links:
How you include an RSS link in your announcements: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-add-an-external-RSS-feed-to-an-announcement-as-an/ta-p/771
How to copy an announcement to another course: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-copy-an-announcement-to-another-course/ta-p/888
Send an announcement to another instructor: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-send-an-announcement-to-another-instructor/ta-p/887