Announcements in Canvas

You can create an announcement to share important information with all users within your course and with users in sections of a course. View all your course announcements in the Announcements Index Page. 

Add an Announcement

  1. In Course Navigation, click the Announcements link.
  2. Click the Add Announcement button.
  3. Type a title for the announcement in the topic title field and add content in the Rich Content Editor.
  4. By default, Canvas will send your announcement to all sections within your course. To select specific sections for your announcement, click the Post to drop-down menu and select sections from the list provided.
    • Note: If your course does not have sections, Canvas will still show the All Sections option, and all course users can view the announcement.
    • Teachers and TA's are notified of all new course Announcements, unless they are Section restricted.
  5. To add an attachment to your discussion, click the Choose File button.
  6. In the Options section, you can select various options for your announcement.
    1. You can allow users to comment on the announcement and require students to reply to a post before seeing other replies.
    2. You can also enable an announcement podcast feed and allow students to like announcement replies.
    3. You can delay your announcement posting, with the Available From field, allowing you to schedule the announcement for a future date and time.
    4. You can hide an announcement at a specified date and time with the Available Until field.
  7. Click the Save button.

Note: Unless you are using the delay posting option in Announcements, once you click Save, your announcement will immediately be posted in your course.

View Announcements

View course announcements on the Announcements Index Page.

  1. In Course Navigation, click the Announcements link.
  2. The Announcements Index page is designed with global settings at the top of the page, followed by individual announcements.

Announcements are listed in reverse chronological order, with the newest appearing first and the older Announcements appearing towards the bottom.

  • Each announcement includes:
    • The name of the announcement
    • The profile picture of the user who posted the announcement
    • An unread indicator near unread announcements
    • The announcement post date
    • The number of unread/total replies in the announcement
    • An options icon to manage individual announcement settings.

 

Show Announcements on Course Homepage

Canvas gives several options for what the Home Page of a course can be.  A customized Page being the home page is one of the more common options.  One of the benefits is you can display recent announcements at the top of the home page for more visibility.  To enable this setting:

  1. In Course Navigation, click the Settings link.
  2. Click more options from the bottom of the page.
  3. Put a check next to Show recent announcements on Course home page.
  4. Select the number of announcements to show.  We recommend showing just the last 1 or 2 announcements to avoid clutter.

 

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