What are Announcements?
Announcements allow instructors to communicate with students about course activities and post interesting course-related topics. Announcements are designed to allow instructors to broadcast information out to all members of a course or to all members of sections within a course. Students may be able to reply to announcements, but replies are not considered to be a conversation and do not appear in the Inbox.
View the Announcements Overview video.
View Announcements
Announcements are used to communicate with students about the logistics of your course. As soon as you have created an announcement, Canvas takes care of notifying students according to their preferred notification settings. There are also unread and read indicators next to the announcement.
In Canvas, you have the option of feeding posts from your blog or other information sources directly into your Announcements page using RSS. RSS feeds can be filtered by keyword to prevent irrelevant content from entering the course. Students who use RSS readers can subscribe to course announcements outside of Canvas.
Notes:
- You can use keyboard shortcuts to navigate individual announcements. To view a window with a list of keyboard navigation shortcuts, press Alt+F8 (on a PC keyboard) or Option+F8 (on a Mac keyboard) simultaneously on your keyboard.
- A profile picture displaying the letter U in place of a user's profile picture indicates that an announcement was imported using a course copy, the Course Import Tool, or a blueprint course. Additionally, copied announcements do not include a posted date and time.
When would I use Announcements?
Use Announcements to:
- Remind your students what they need to accomplish to stay on track.
- Point students to internal and external resources that will help them achieve course Outcomes.
- Leave a message for the entire class with video or audio comments.
- Celebrate student success and important events that may be of interest to your students.
- Feed a custom RSS feed related to the topic of the course to your students.
- Automatically share blog posts written by your students on Wordpress, Blogger, etc. with custom RSS feeds.
Announcements Redesign
If enabled by your institution, Announcements Redesign provides an enhanced experience for course announcements.
An announcement displayed in the Announcements Redesign interface includes three sections: the announcement toolbar, announcement, and announcement replies.
You can use the toolbar to search for replies or specific authors, filter by all replies or unread replies, sort replies by newest or oldest, and return to the top of an announcement.
