From CLEW Wiki

In this article:

• Overview Announcements
• Getting Started
• Navigate Announcements List
• Adding and Editing Announcements
• Displaying an Announcement
• Adding or Linking an Attachment
• Sending Announcement Update Emails

Contents 1 Overview 1.1 Getting Started 1.2 Navigate Announcements List 2 How To 3 Announcements Basics 3.1 Adding and Editing Announcements 3.2 Displaying an Announcement 3.3 Adding or Linking an Attachment 3.4 Sending Announcement Update Emails 3.5 Edit an Announcement 3.6 Read / Sort Announcements 3.7 Deleting an Announcement 3.8 Merge Announcements 3.9 Announcements Options 3.10 Announcements Permissions 4 Considerations 4.1 FAQ – Announcements 4.1.1 Create announcements? 4.1.2 Why didn't the students know about my announcement? 4.2 Related Articles

Overview

Announcements are used to inform site participants of current items of interest. Announcements can have multiple attachments, including documents and URLs. It is possible to draft and save an announcement before sending it out to site participants or posting it on the site. Announcements appear in a list when you are in the Announcements Tool. They also appear on the "Home" page of each course or project site. Site owners and instructors can choose to have an announcement automatically emailed to all of the site participants by using the "required notification" setting shown below.

Getting Started

To get started, click "Announcements" in the left-menu. If you don't see the tool listed, you will need to add it using the Site Editor -> Edit Tools function.

Navigate Announcements List

In the Announcements home page, you may choose the number of announcements to display on a single page. Select from the "show 10 items" drop-down list and select the number of announcements (items) to show per page. This selection only affects your view and doesn't affect your students' view. To advance to the next page or return to the previous page of announcements list, click the arrow buttons to the right and left of the "show" list.

To view only the public announcements of announcements by groups, choose the appropriate selection from the "View" drop-down list.

How To

Announcements Basics

Adding and Editing Announcements

The Announcements tool allows you to inform site participants about items of interest, deadlines, events, or activities, and is a useful tool when posting a notice about important changes in meeting times, deadlines, or meeting locations. Announcements appear on the Home page of your course or project site. You can also choose to have an announcement automatically sent via email to all site participants (available when the course site is launched only).

Note: To post an announcement, be sure you have selected the correct course or project site tab. The active tab will have a white background.

• Select Announcements in the left-hand menu of your course site.

• In the “Announcements” home page, select Add on the "Announcements" menu bar.
• Enter a relevant subject for your announcement next to Announcement title. This field is mandatory. Titles are viewed on the “Announcements” home page.
• Enter the body of the announcement message in the text box and use the Rich Text Editor to format the text as necessary. If you plan on pasting text into the body of the announcement, please see the section on “Pasting Text in the Rich Text Editor from MS Word.”

Displaying an Announcement

1. Under Access, select how to display your announcement by choosing from these options:
   1. Display to public: Visible to members of other sites
   2. Display to site: Visible to site participants only
   3. Display to selected groups: Visible only to certain sections or groups. Use the checkboxes to choose which groups or sections can view the announcement. Note: If you don't see the Display to selected groups option, no groups or sections are associated with your site.
2. Under Availability, you will see Show selected, which means this announcement can be immediately viewed when created. You may change this selection to Hide this announcement from your students (if you need to finish it at a later time), or you may choose to set a start and/or a stop date to when this announcement will be viewable.
3. The most recent announcements will be displayed on the site’s home page in chronological order. The most recent announcements for all the sites to which you belong will appear in your My Workspace. To add, edit, or delete announcements, use the Announcements tool. Some customization of how Announcements appear is available by selecting Options.

Adding or Linking an Attachment

1. (Optional) To add one or more attachments to an announcement, select Attachments, Browse to choose your file, and double click the filename you want to upload from your computer. Then select Continue to add the attachment.
2. Instead of adding an attachment from your computer hard drive or portable drive, you may select one of the other attachment options: a URL to link to a website; a resource already in your Resources tool; or a resource from another site. Note: If you should choose to attach a file from another site, please ensure that your students have at least “read” access to these files on that site. See Actions -> Edit Details when selecting that resource item to adjust if necessary.
3. Select Continue to add the attachment(s).

Sending Announcement Update Emails

1. (Optional) If you want to send an email notification to all site participants, choose High – All participants from the Email Notification drop-down menu. This option ignores user notification preferences and sends the email to all participants of the site. Select Low – Only participants who have opted in if the announcement does not need to be emailed to those who have opted out of receiving “low priority” email notifications. The default position for email notification is set to None – no notification, so you must change that if you wish the message to go to your students.

See the section on Changing Email Notification Options for more information about settings your participants may have enabled.

1. If you choose to specify dates as mentioned in the “Displaying an Announcement” section, the notification will be emailed on the specified date.
2. Select Add Announcement to post your announcement. You will be returned to the Announcements home page.
3. If specific groups are enabled on the site, an Announcement will be visible and can be sent to the specific group and the maintainers of the site.

An email will be sent to students only if the site is “launched .” Announcements that have been hidden from students will appear in a grey font to instructors.

Edit an Announcement

To edit an announcement:

1. In the left-menu of the relevant course or project site, click Announcements.
2. Under your announcement's subject, click Edit.
   Note: If you don't have sufficient rights to edit a particular announcement, you will not see the option to revise it. Also, you can edit only one announcement at a time.
3. Make the desired changes to your announcement.
4. After editing, click Save Changes to save your changes, Preview to preview your announcement, or Cancel to cancel your changes.

Read / Sort Announcements

You can read announcements from within each site to which you belong. Enter a site, and from the left-menu, click Announcements. To read an announcement, click its title.

From My Workspace, you can view a consolidated list of announcements from all your sites. Enter My Workspace, and from the left-menu click "Announcements". To read an announcement, click its title.

You can sort the announcements list in the following ways:

• To arrange the announcements alphabetically by title, click Subject. Click Subject again to reverse the order.
• To arrange the announcements alphabetically by the author's last name, click Saved By. Click Saved By again to reverse the order.
• In "My Workspace", to arrange the announcements alphabetically by the originating site, click Site. Click Site again to reverse the order.
• In a course or project site, to arrange the announcements alphabetically by audience, click For. Click For again to reverse the order.
• To arrange the announcements chronologically, click either Beginning Date or Ending Date. Click either Beginning Date or Ending Date again to reverse the order.

(Note: Announcements that are hidden and appear grey, will always be displayed first in the list, regardless of the sort order.)

Deleting an Announcement

To delete one or more announcements:

1. In the left-menu of the relevant course or project site, click Announcements.
2. Under Remove?, check the box(es) next to the announcement(s) you want to delete.
   Note: If you don't have sufficient rights to delete a particular announcement, you will not see a box next to its title.
3. Click the Update button.
4. On the confirmation screen, click Remove to remove the announcement or Cancel to cancel the removal.

Merge Announcements

The Merge Announcements allows you to choose to show Announcements from any or all other sites in which you are enrolled. If you teach three English courses, you can show "Announcements" from all three. Be aware that you cannot pick and choose the Announcements from each course that you want to merge, and ALL announcements will be merged. Deleting an announcement on the merged site will also delete the announcement on the second site. The only way to delete a merged announcement is to do so from the site it was originally posted to. If you choose a course to merge, it will bring in every Announcement from that course, even those that are hidden, though they are also hidden here.

Once your Announcements are merged, students will see the Announcements for the courses in which they are enrolled. To follow our example above, if you teach three graduate level English courses and several of your students are enrolled in all three courses, those students will be able to see the Announcements for all three of the courses. Students who are not enrolled in all three courses, will only see the Announcements for their course(s).

To merge Announcements:

1. At the top of the main Announcements screen, click Merge
2. Check the box next to the course(s) from which you want to display Announcements
3. Click Save

To Undo a Merge:

1. Click Merge on the menu bar in the Announcements home page.
2. Click the Show Announcement check box to remove the check mark for the site(s) whose announcements you want to no longer appear on the current site.
3. Click Save to finish or Cancel to exit without undoing the merge.

Announcements Options

Options allows you to determine how you want your Announcements to appear, and also allows for the creation of an RSS feed to your publicly viewable announcements.

To set up your Announcement Options, at the top of the main Announcements screen, click Options Display options -

• Sortable Table View allows you to change the order of the Announcements based on Subject, From (the person who created the Announcement), Site (from which course this Announcement originated), For (public or specific to a course), Date (the date on which the Announcement was created, Beginning Date and Ending Date). In the Sortable table view, click the heading for the item you want to sort. For example, you might want to sort them according to the Beginning Date, so click that heading to arrange the announcements from the earliest to the latest beginning date. Click the heading again to sort them from the latest to the earliest beginning date.

• Sortable Table View with Announcement Body is like "Sortable Table View" except that the body of your Announcement is also displayed.

• List View with Announcement Body provides a list of your Announcements, with the most recently created Announcement first. You cannot change the order of the Announcements in this view. The body of the Announcement is listed under each Announcement subject. The subject is hyperlinked so that you can view all information about the Announcements.

• Characters in body allows you to determine how much of the body of the Announcement will be revealed in the table or list. By default, All is chosen so that the entire text of the body is displayed. You may choose to show only the first 50 or the first 100 characters from the drop-down menu.
• RSS Feed Options public announcements only
  • You can create an RSS feed that students can add to an RSS feed reader such as "FeedDemon" or "Google Reader." This will enable them to receive the Announcements inside this reader along with the other RSS feeds to which they subscribe.Only publicly viewable announcements can be viewed in the RSS feed.
    • Type an RSS Alias. The alias should contain lower case letters, numbers and no spaces. An example would be "arc101-announcements."
    • Click Update. Once you click Update, the RSS URL is updated to include the alias you entered.
    • Click Options again to return to this screen. Now you can click the RSS URL to add this RSS feed to your RSS reader of choice.
      • If you want students to be able to add the RSS feed, you will need to place this RSS URL into an Announcement for them.

• Display Limits
  • Insert the number of days that you want Announcements to appear. For example, if you enter "30," and create an Announcement on September 1, it will disappear from the list on October 1. If you enter nothing, your Announcements will stay on the list until you delete them.
  • Insert the maximum number of Announcements you have in the list at one time. For example, if you enter "10," once you create the 11th Announcement, the first one you created will be dropped from the list.
• Click Update

Announcements Permissions

Permissions for all tools have been set to most common usage. It is highly recommended that you do not alter these Permissions without a consultation with a member of the CLEW Team. Altering Permissions may have unintended consequences.

Considerations

• Low Priority- Individuals have the ability to adjust the types of email communications they receive and can set the "Do not send me low priority announcements" option under My Workspace - Preferences. If you send out an Announcement with Low Priority set, you can't guarantee that all of your participants will receive it.
• Try not to run your site through Announcements- As individuals will get a compilation of all Announcements of the sites they are attached to in My Workspace, if there are several lengthy announcements they receive, they may "tune-out" important messages. Consider sending an Announcement to indicate where else on your site they may find information or when something important has happened or changed. Other tools can continue communicating when you want students to be aware of things such as a new Resource that has been posted, a change has occurred in the Syllabus etc. Check out the Email Notification options in several of CLEW's tools to reduce the actual number of Announcements you might need.
• One at a time - You can only edit one Announcement at a time.

FAQ – Announcements

How do I . . .?

Create announcements?

There are two quick ways to get started in creating an announcement:

1. On your home page, select Announcements from the left-hand menu. Next, select Add from the grey menu bar.
2. On your home page, select the title of any announcement displayed in the right-hand “Recent Announcements” list. This opens the "Announcements" tool. Then select Add from the grey menu bar.

Then fill in the rest of the options as they appear on the Announcements screens.

Why didn't the students know about my announcement?

Be sure to select the High-All Participants option in the Email Notification before you click Add Announcement or your students won't get an email about it. The default option in the tool is None - No Notification.

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