Course Announcements

FirstClass Teaching & Learning Migration

In FirstClass, you may have used the main conference area to post announcement messages.  For important announcements, you may have also sent an email to your class list, and well as sending to your course's FirstClass conference.  You can achieve the same results using the Announcement tool in Blackboard.   There is no more need to lookup a class list for sending an email announcements, it is all built-in to Blackboard. 

Making a course announcement in Blackboard is easy and one of the fastest and best ways to communicate with your class about various things like important due dates, upcoming requirements for the next class, room changes, etc.  Your announcement will be posted to the course's "home page", so that will be the first thing a student will see when viewing your course. 

My Course -> Control Panel -> Announcements

The Course Announcement menu is similar to most content items in Blackboard.  You provide the text that is displayed on the webpage.

One of the best features of the Course Announcement tool is the ability to Email your entire class as well as having your announcement posted on your Blackboard site.  Having your announcement posted will ensure that even if a student joins your course late, they will still have access to view all announcements you have made. 

Another benefit of using the Announcement tool is that your announcement will be displayed front and centre in your student's "My Page" under the general announcement section whenever they login to Blackboard.

A feature of the course announcement tool is the "Course Link" option to reference a particular part of your Blackboard course.  For example, if you post your Powerpoint presentations for week 3 in your Blackboard Course Documents section, you can link to that section/page right in the announcement so your students know exactly where the information is you are referring to.

Return to the FirstClass migration menu.