Announcements

You can create an announcement to share important information with all users within your course and with users in sections of a course. In your notification preferences, you can choose to receive notifications for announcements created by you as well as replies to announcements you’ve created. 

Important 

  • Your course must be published for students to receive announcement notifications. If you import an announcement from another course, new announcement notifications will not send to course users.
  • If an announcement is created 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 before the start date.
  • Notifications from Canvas come from [email protected], and they often show up in the “other” or “updates” area of your inbox.

How to use – Canvas instructions

Guides

Canvas offers a series of in-depth guides on Announcements, including creating, editing, and scheduling announcements for your class.  

Video 

Watch a quick video (2m 23s) on the announcements tool in Canvas. 

00:07: What are announcements? 00:09: In course navigation click the announcements link 00:13: Course announcements display on the announcements index page 00:17: To communicate with students about the logistics of a course instructors 00:21: can add an announcement. Instructors can format and add content to 00:25: announcements using the rich content editor features. 00:29: Instructors can also use announcement options to allow others to reply comment 00:33: enable podcast feeds allow liking and to specify 00:37: a time frame for the announcement. 00:40: As soon as an instructor creates an announcement canvas takes care of notifying 00:44: students according to their preferred notification settings. 00:48: There are also unread and read indicators next to the announcements. 00:53: Instructors have the option of feeding posts from a blog or other information sources 00:57: directly into their announcements page using RSS. 01:00: RSS feeds can be filtered by keyword to prevent irrelevant content from 01:04: entering the course. Students who use RSS readers can 01:08: subscribe to course announcements outside of canvas 01:13: As an instructor use announcements to Remind 01:17: your students what they need to accomplish to stay on track Point students to 01:21: internal and external resources that will help them achieve course outcomes. 01:24: Leave a message for the entire class with video or audio comments. 01:29: Celebrate Student Success and important events that may be of interest to your students. 01:34: Feed a custom RSS fee related to the topic of the course to your students 01:38: automatically share blog posts written by your students on WordPress 01:42: blogger Etc with custom RSS feeds. 01:47: As a student you may be able to view and reply to course announcements. 01:51: You may also be able to add announcements in a student group. 01:56: This guide covered announcements

Best Practices 

  • Many instructors choose to send a weekly announcement recapping what has occurred in the past week and looking forward to the upcoming one. This framing can help students feel connected to the course and on task.  
  • These weekly announcements are a place to highlight good conversations being had in the classroom or discussion board, important due dates, and news topics that connect with the course. 

Accessibility 

  • Do not use colors to denote meaning in the text. 
  • Consider contrast when formatting text.  It is best to keep text formatting simple (black text, white background). 
  • Avoid blinking or moving text or gifs. 
  • Be sure to provide alt text for images and include captions and sources for images.