Manage Your Class with Announcements
Manage Your Class with Announcements: What and Why
Announcements are a great way to reach your students and reflect on what is happening- with you, the course, the students and the world. Regular weekly announcements help create student engagement and help reinforce concepts and they can also give you an opportunity to recognize students contributions and point out exemplary work to the larger class. Announcements are key to establishing your presence to the entire class. As an instructor you might be delivering one-on-one feedback to individual students but the class as a whole will feel instructor presence lacking.
Announcements can be delivered in text (remember your tone!) and in video. Just remember, make them friendly, give students tips, let them know you want them to succeed, and read everything twice before you submit.
Be human, be present and be flexible!
From The Art & Science of Quality Course Announcements: Links to an external site.
"Plan announcements in advance whenever possible. Develop an editorial calendar to manage content. If you’ve already posted an important announcement that day and you feel the urge to post again, ask yourself if the content can wait a day. Try to focus on one main idea in each announcement. Use the date release tool in your LMS (if available) to manage your time. You can create daily announcements for the week in one sitting and release one per day to your students. Always ask the question, will this announcement do more harm than good?"
Strategies
Some strategies for your announcements from Building Community and Creating Relevance in the Online Classroom Links to an external site.
- Provide an introduction each week and share your availability.
- Give feedback and answer questions from the previous week.
- Showcase exceptional student work from the previous week.
- Highlight the objectives of the coming week and any special preparation or required resources.
- Connect your coursework to relevant current events.
Showcase
Instructor Karen Haskell, teaches a Research Writing course, and she uses weekly announcements to remind students of upcoming milestones and due dates. The writing course is one that our NEIT students have found challenging. They have reported back that these reminders help them to stay on track and stay connected. Karen makes sure she copies her announcements into the newest version of the course from term to term. She uses them as a jumping off point and customizes reminders as needed. Karen also delays posting some of her announcements until a specific date Links to an external site. in her course. This course also illustrates a Canvas setting where the latest announcements appear at the top of the Course Home Page. See How do I show recent announcements in the Course Home Page? Links to an external site. to learn how to use this setting. We typically look at the top of a web page first--so use this setting to draw focus to your recent announcements.
The research writing course has a TA in the form of a Librarian to coach students through some of the APA requirements and strategies for conducting effective research. The Instructor and Librarian coordinate their coaching announcements as the course unfolds.
Here is an example of one of the specific milestone reminder announcements, copied from a previous course and tailored for the timing of this course. Karen set it to a delayed release of the Monday of Week 3.