Create a Global Announcements Archive!

ssimpso4
Community Contributor
15
3506

Context

In our school district, I strive to limit global announcements to one-per-month and use them exclusively for Canvas-related tips, resources, and learning opportunities. Here's a recent example:

An image of the April Announcement provided to users in Arlington ISD. The image shows green spring leaves, a faded out Super Canvas Panda, and text reading

These announcements auto-open and close using the availability dates provided to account admins when creating or editing global announcements in Canvas.

There's just one problem, however. Many teacher users click the 'X' by accident or before reading the announcement's contents when it appears on their Canvas Dashboard. How can they retrieve or regain access to that announcement if it has disappeared?

Suggested Workaround

In Arlington ISD, I've added a publicly-visible course titled 'Global Announcements Archive' as a custom link in our Canvas Help Menu. It looks like this:

An image showing Arlington ISD

When teacher users click on the link, they navigate to a publicly visible Canvas course where we replicate each announcement as a Content Page within a Module. As you'll see, the course's home page is set to Modules.

An image showing the appearance of the publicly-visible course that contains a module for all announcements made during the

The Payoff

The primary benefit of creating and maintaining a Global Announcements Archive is that I can direct any user to it in those instances in which they have overlooked, ignored, or accidentally removed an announcement on their Dashboard.

Additionally, it's a useful way for me to revisit past efforts to communicate important information to our Canvas users. I look forward to being able to revisit the archive next school year so as to avoid the need to completely reinvent the wheel in regard to the resources we provide at the beginning of a new term!

If you haven't thought about the potential payoff of creating an Announcements Archive in Canvas, give it some thought. I've definitely found it to be a worthwhile resource to provide to our users! Smiley Happy

15 Comments
kona
Community Champion

This is an amazing idea that I'm probably going to steal!! Thank you for sharing!

laurakgibbs
Community Champion

Oh, this is fantastic!!! What a great use of a publicly shared Canvas course!

I am really hoping that people at my school will start to embrace this use of Canvas as a shared content platform, so I am bookmarking this to share with people as we move into our first all-Canvas year next year (this year was a soft rollout for us).

Thank you so much for writing about this here!!!

One thing I have been experimenting with is making ready-to-use Twitter widgets to profile the use of Twitter by organizations at my school, and I set that up as a public course so that people could just copy-and-paste the Twitter into their course spaces. It's not hard to make a Twitter widget, but it does involve a couple of steps... by offering these as ready-to-use copy-and-paste, I hope some people will consider including the Twitter feeds for our Libraries, Museums, etc. in their Canvas spaces. 🙂

https://canvas.ou.edu/courses/56095/pages/twitter-widget-catalog 

Our student newspaper, for example, has a great Twitter feed, so useful!

OU Daily Twitter feed

ssimpso4
Community Contributor

Thanks for sharing this example of using a publicly-visible course! Previously, I've only used the Twitter LTI app and embed code from H5P to embed a Twitter feed in Canvas.

The downside to H5P's current option is that it only supports feeds from user accounts (@AISDdigitalearn), not hashtags (#arlingtech). I like that the LTI app supports both, but you're likely getting the most options via your widget HTML.

LTI app:

225312_lti app.png

H5P embed:

225313_H5P example.png

laurakgibbs
Community Champion

I really rely on the media in Twitter, images and videos. I'm also a fan of lists. So the Twitter Widget works for me, and thanks to help from people here at the Community, I learned how to make the Twitter javascript work! It's not hard: all you have to do is upload the javascript into a File, and then use iframe to display the File inside a Page. It's a little weird, but once you get used to it, it's not hard, and the same trick works for other javascript widgets like Pinterest Boards and Flickr Albums.

Three cheers for public courses!!! 🙂

Chris_Hofer
Community Coach
Community Coach

This is a really great idea...and so simple, too!  We use Global Announcements quite a bit to communicate information to our instructors and students, and sometimes I keep an announcement in the administrative pages of Canvas (not showing to anyone but us admins) so that I have a template to work with the next time a similar announcement comes along.  Thanks for the idea, ssimpso4‌!

awilliams
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

I like this idea for it's simplicity and native use of Canvas. 

But just to add a bit more flavor to the mix, when our global announcement is a thing we think people are going to want to refer back to, we make a post to our blog. Folks can opt-in and subscribe to that blog via email, which is good for us because I have sworn not to email them unless it's really important. The other really nice thing about the blog is that I'm able to grab the RSS feed and reuse the content in various ways and places using Inoreader's HTML clips or FeedWind's widgets. You can see an example of that on the home page of our public Resource Center for Faculty course where we've created tabs of our blog contents and various community resources.

laurakgibbs
Community Champion

awilliams‌ already knows that I am a fan of Inoreader, and that I think his Resource Center site is fantastic! I am really hoping something like that will evolve at my school as we go all-Canvas next year.

I am a big fan of blogs for class announcements too and ... serendipity! ... I'm doing a CanvasLIVE about that this week, on Thursday, April 6. The slides and resources are available now for anybody who is interested:

Blog-as-Homepage CanvasLIVE Slides – Teaching with Canvas 

And here's the CanvasLIVE event page:

https://community.canvaslms.com/events/2012-practical-tips-for-using-a-blog-as-a-course-home-page 

CanvasLIVE screenshot

KristinL
Community Team
Community Team

Creating an archive of your announcements is brilliant. We have a building-wide Staff Resources "mega-course", and I think I'll add a Global Announcements Archive module next school year. Thanks for sharing!! Smiley Happy

kmeeusen
Community Champion

Awesome ssimpso4!

I gotta go play with this! I really like creative uses of the native Canvas tool set.

KLM

mjoaquin
Community Participant

Man why haven't I thought of a monthly Global Announcement. ssimpso4‌ you help me (practically daily) realize how much I still have to learn!! I love it. 

ssimpso4
Community Contributor

We all have a lot to learn,  @mjoaquin ! For example, I struggle to fill out invoices ( @Renee_Carney ) and can't seem to keep my public courses public (snufer) . . .

227918_befuddled.jpg 

mjoaquin
Community Participant

This is an excellent image! 

cblanos
Community Novice

ssimpso4 This is exactly the solution I need to help me solve my archiving issue. We send out weekly Canvas Tips announcements and instructors wanted to access them once they were accidentally closed. Thank you!

myerdon01
Community Champion

I LOVE this idea-I had not thought about archiving announcements! I sort of did the same thing for student resources at our school. Things students are told (but soon forget), things they may have gotten an email for (but deleted it), and things we may have forgotten to tell them (like how to add $ to their printing account). I also added this as a public course and put a link in our Help Menu and sent the URL to teachers if they want to add it to their Canvas courses or send to students directly. I am going to add a module of archived announcements now!

292121_pastedImage_1.png

SHEBENE
Community Champion

+1 on stealing this idea! Thanks ssimpso4‌! (and carroll-ccsd‌ for pointing out this post to me)