Large red speakers saying "Announcement" to a crowd of peole

Adapted from “Speakers” from Pixabay

Do You Use the “Announcement” Feature in Canvas?

Beware: Your Students May Not Be Getting the Messages You Think They Are

Using announcements are easy. You just click on that easy little navigation button on the left side of your class, click +Announcement and boom, you could use pictures, videos, attachments, text, etc. Then, click “Save” and you’re golden, right?…Not necessarily.

It’s entirely possible your students aren’t getting these messages or even know that they exist. The reason is because students have to go into their personal settings, click on notifications and make sure the announcements are coming to an email, phone number, Facebook, or Twitter account that they’ll actually look at. The default email is their student email account. The last statistic I heard about how many students check their student email addresses is less than 5%. Those are not good odds.

Well, does that mean you can’t use this really cool tool? No. It just means if you’re going to use it, you have to tell students to expect that you’ll use it and that they need to set up their notification preferences to get the messages they need, when they need them and where they need them. Here’s a really great tutorial on how to set notification preferences from the Canvas Guides.

And now you know…