Canvas 21-22 SY Announcements & About this Course Page

Announcements & About this Course: An Overview

Announcements are a useful way to communicate with students in your courses. In 2021-2022 weekly plans will be posted as announcements. We'll be pinning announcements to the course home page. Unless students change their default notification settings, announcements will also be sent to students' email, so announcements should be used judiciously.

This year each course will have an 'About this Course' button in the course navigation menu on the left. In your course this button will link students to what we used to call a 'first day sheet': course expectations, grading policies, extra help arrangements, academic honesty policy, teacher contact info etc.

Expectations

1. Announcements will be pinned to the top of your course homepage.

2. Weekly Plans will be shared with students via Announcements by 11:59pm EST each Saturday.

3.The About this Course page will be used to house key information on the course.

Adding Announcements & About This Course

Announcements are a useful tool within Canvas. As with other communication tools, it's important not to swamp students with announcements. It's therefore important to make initial communications on any topic accurate and clear, to minimize the need for follow-ups. You can choose how many announcements to pin to your course homepage - three is a recommended maximum.

The 'About this Course' button will be set up in all courses, and by default it will be linked to a template page. You can edit this template. The About this Course button in your live courses will link to the synced template pages. If you choose to create or import a different page for About this Course you'll need to follow the instructions below to "Set your About this Course" page.

Examples, Options, & Help Resources

Pin Announcements to the Course Home Page

A useful way to make your announcements visible to students is to pin announcements to the course homepage.

1. To enable this feature click on "Settings" at the bottom of the Course Navigation Menu on the left:

Screen Shot 2021-07-07 at 4.00.58 PM-1.png

2. Now scroll to the end of the page and click "More Options":

More Options.png

3. Now check the box shown and choose the number of announcements you'd like to pin - 3 is a suggested maximum

Then click "Update Course Details"

Pin Announcements.png

4. Your three most recent announcements (it doesn't matter whether these were created before or after you changed settings)

will now appear on your course homepage. In the demo class I'm using I created just one announcement. Here's how it appears on the Course Home Page:

Screen Shot 2021-07-07 at 4.06.41 PM.png

5. If you wish to remove an announcement you'll need to either change the number of announcements to be pinned in step 3 above,

or delete the announcement altogether. To delete an announcement, click on Announcements on the Course Navigation Menu,

click the three dot menu, and click "Delete"

Delete Announcement.png

Set your 'About this Course' Page

Here's how to set the 'About this Course' button to link to a different page:

1. Assuming the desired page is already in your course (so students have access), copy the URL of the page

2. Click on 'Settings' in the Course Navigation menu on the left:

Screen Shot 2021-07-07 at 4.00.58 PM-3.png

3. Click on the 'Apps' tab than click 'View App Configurations':

View App Configs.png 4. From the pull down menu for the 'About this Course' app choose Edit:

Edit App Configs.png 5. In the box paste the url of the page you want to link to after 'url ='

Then click 'Submit'

Change About this Page.png

Embedding Google Slides in Announcements

Google Slides allow more flexible use of graphic elements than a canvas page or announcement. You may therefore want to embed a google sheet in an announcement. (A similar approach will work for Google Sheets or google Docs). Note that how Google sheets are embedded will change this August, so you may need to re-embed Slides after the change, using the same method show below.

Here's how to embed a Google Slide in a live course.

If you haven't already done so you'll need to connect Google Drive to Canvas:

When following the steps linked below be sure to log in to your St. Mark's Google account:

Connect Google Drive to Canvas

Once you're connected you can start creating your announcement. In the rich content editor choose Google Drive from the Apps pull down menu:

Choose Google Apps.png Next enter the name of your Slides document into the search field. Then click on the document name when it appears to select it, and lastly click the embed button:

Search Select Embed7-16 at 5.02.57 PM.png

Your Slides will be embedded in the announcement and you can scroll down and click 'Save':

embedded Slides.png

Don't forget to save!

Screen Shot 2021-07-16 at 5.05.45 PM.png