Announcements Tool

The Announcements tool allows you to send messages to the members of your OWL-Space site. These messages will appear on the home page of your OWL-Space site, in the Announcements tool, on your members' home pages and Announcements tools, and in their email as well depending on their preferences. You can automatically send announcements from within many of the other OWL-Space tools (announcing assignment open dates, for example).

The main page of the Announcements tool shows a list of all your announcements, the subject line of the announcement, who sent it, what OWL-Space site the announcement was sent from (if you have Merged another site's announcements with your own), what group of your members it was sent to, the date it was sent, and the starting and ending dates for the announcement if applicable. On the right hand side are check boxes that can be used to remove announcements by checking the box for announcements you wish to remove and then pressing the Update button at the bottom of the page. In the View selection box, you can choose to view all announcements, only public announcements, or to sort the announcements by the groups they were sent to.

Clicking on an announcement name will show you the details and text of the announcement. Clicking on the Edit link will allow you to change any of the details for the announcement just as when creating a new announcement in the Add tab.

The Add tab allows you to create a new announcement. Announcement title is the subject line of your announcement, a headline which will appear in the list of announcements and be the only part of the announcement visible to your members until they open the announcement. Body is the actual text of the announcement, and can be entered using the OWL-Space text editor interface.

You can decide whether to display the announcement to the public, only to members of your site, or only to sub-groups of your membership (which can be chosen after selecting Display to selected groups). You can also choose whether the announcement is visible, hidden, or only appears for a certain period of time. For the third option, you can choose a starting date, an ending date, or both. With only a beginning date, your announcement will be viewable from that time forward. With only an ending date, your announcement will be visible from as soon as you add it until the selected date. With both starting and ending date, your announcement will be visible only between the two dates, and hidden before and after that time period.

You can attach files to your announcement if desired, using the Add attachments button.

Finally, you can send the announcement to your members via email (in addition to having it appear on OWL-Space, which always occurs). Choosing None in the Email Notification selection box sends no email, so your announcement will only show up on OWL-Space. Choosing High Priority will send your announcement to all your members via email as well as appearing on OWL-Space. Choosing Low Priority will email the announcement only to members who have set their preferences (via their My Workspace site) to receive Low Priority announcements via email, but all members will be able to view the announcement on OWL-Space.

When done, you can either Preview your announcement or Add it by pressing the appropriate button.

The Merge tab allows you to show announcements on your OWL-Space site from one or more other OWL-Space sites of which you are a member. Check the boxes to the right of all sites whose announcements you want to include, then press the save button at the bottom of the page.

The Options tab allows you to change how the main page of the Announcements tool appears. You can display announcements in a sortable table (the default view), as a sortable table but also showing the announcement body (the main text of the announcement, not just the title), or as an unsortable list of announcements showing the announcement body. When displayed as a list, the announcements will be sorted from oldest at the top to newest at the bottom. The list also displays the information in a somewhat different format, and does not show the site the announcement is from, what group it was sent to, or the start and end dates. There is an Edit and Remove link for each announcement, rather than check boxes.

Options also lets you set the maximum number of announcements to be displayed, and how old of announcements can be displayed. Choosing 10 for Number of announcements will make only the last 10 announcements visible. Choosing 5 for Number of days in the past makes only announcements within the last 5 days visible. Choosing both would make only the last 10 announcements that are less than 5 days old visible. Leaving either or both options blank makes no limitation of that sort on the announcements that are visible.

The Permissions tab allows you to specify what each type of members of your site (students, TAs, etc.) can do in the Announcements tool. You can decide who can read announcements, who can add new announcements, who can delete announcements, who can edit announcements, and who can see drafts of announcements.