I have Business/Economics news alerts as RSS feeds that I've added to my announcement streams, but I don't want them filling student inboxes with emails.
I'd rather there was...
- a weekly summary emailed
- an assignment that they are expected to check weekly that contains the latest feed posts (and the assignment might track when students entered the assignment and how long they were there)
- some other space that hosts RSS feeds that doesn't mean students get email notifications
I think there must be a better way of me doing this - probably a nifty trick I have forgotten...
Thanks in advance for any advice received!
Hi Dr Rimmer! The RSS-in-Announcements feature at Canvas is pretty limited (I really wish they had developed that feature more fully, but I am guessing that they see just how little RSS is understood/used by most educators, and they just decided to leave it as a kind of primitive feature). Luckily, though, there are other kinds of syndication options. If you search the Community here for Inoreader, you will find lots of mentions by me: I use Inoreader to create all kinds of RSS feeds that appear in my Canvas courses, most importantly my students' blogs and, starting now, their semester projects (for which I use Diigo RSS). Here's a search of the Community for Inoreader, and if you have any questions, let me know!
https://community.canvaslms.com/search.jspa?q=inoreader
Basically Inoreader lets you subscribe to feeds, put them in folders (multiple feeds in a folder is how I create my student blog network), and then export out the folder feed as RSS or as HTML... it is the HTML option that makes it so useful in Canvas!
As for weekly summaries and getting students to engage with the content in question, the way I do that is by offering a little extra credit assignment for students to read through the past week's announcements and post their favorite item in their blog. That is useful extra credit for them (they keep up with the announcements, and since I do daily announcements, I don't really even expect people to read them all), and it is also useful for me. When I see what they pick as their favorite items, then I get a better sense of what kinds of things they like to see. Here's that assignment:
Online Course Wiki / Backup and Review
I don't know if it would be of interest to you or not, but I do my class announcements as a blog, and I just display that blog inside Canvas; you can see how that works here at one of my classes (classes are all open):
Daily Announcements: MLLL-3043-995