How do I post an announcement?
Tool Overview
The announcement tool provides an excellent method for posting important notices. The content of these announcements can be as varied as the instructor desires since the tool has the ability to integrate with many other tools within the Trunk environment. For example, an instructor may use the announcements tool to post a reminder for important deadlines or for impromptu changes like a cancellation of class due to snow. Some other tools have options which allow them to post announcements within a course as well.
By default, Trunk will display course announcements on the course homepage. To display a list of announcements for all of your Trunk sites, you must first click on the My Workspace tab and then access the announcement tool in the Tools Menu on the left side of the page.
In addition to plain text, the announcements tool is robust enough to allow instructors to post using a rich text editor, to insert photos within the body of a message, or to add files as an attachment.
Posting an Announcement
View Video | Download full PDF on Announcements tool
- Navigate to the course site.
- From the Tools Menu on the left side of the page, locate the Announcements tool in the Communications group.
- The Announcements tool menu bar will display towards the top of the page. Click Add.
- A new window appears displaying the Add Announcement form. The items marked with a red asterisks are required.
- Type a name for the Announcement in the box labeled Announcement title.
- In the large box labeled Body, enter the text for the Announcement. Trunk provides a comprehensive list of tools in its Rich Text Editor that enable an announcement to be further formatted according to an instructor’s taste. If an announcement has been preformatted using Microsoft Word, the editor has a useful Paste from Word tool which can be utilized to preserve the format.
- Determine the Access level.
- The default setting Only members of this site can see this announcement limits the viewing of the announcement to only those Trunk community members who explicitly have access to the course.
- The publicly viewable setting grants access to all members of the Trunk community regardless if they can access the course.
- The Availability option is an important setting for determining the duration of the announcement.
- The default setting, Show, displays the announcement immediately and permanently.
- The Hide setting can be used to save the announcement as a draft for a later posting or to archive the announcement if it contains text that can be reused.
- Specify Dates is a setting which can be used when the announcement has a known duration. Selecting this setting opens up hidden checkboxes which can be used to set a beginning and ending time for the announcement.
- The Attachments option can be used to attach a file to the announcement. The file can come from your desktop, a hosted website, or from the course’s Resources tool. The maximum size of the attachment is limited to 20 MB.
- The final option is to set an Email Notification for the Announcement. The default setting is None – No Notification. Use the drop down list to choose a different setting.
- High – All participants: An email will be sent to each course member when the announcement is created.
- Low – Only participants who have opted in: An email will be sent only to those course members whose preferences are set to receive low-priority announcements.
- To preview the announcement before publishing, click Preview. The Announcement Preview window is displayed summarizing the settings and the message of the posting. If changes need to be made, click Edit and update the announcement accordingly.
- Click Add Announcement when the announcement is ready to be published based on the chosen settings.
Tip: You can find a list of your course sites in the Quicklinks toolbar within Trunk
