Announcements
Announcements are like group messages. In the early days we used to have a way to send large numbers of messages out to every member of a group, but what we found was happening was that people's inboxes were getting filled up quickly, and they were ignoring all messages.
The other problem was that sending out a hundred individual messages meant that often you would get a hundred individual replies, many of which duplicated themselves.
The Announcements on CAGD are a way of sending out messages to a whole group (or several groups), and keeping all the replies and comments together as a communal thing. If one person asks a question and you answer it, everyone else can see and won't ask the same question again.
Reading Announcements
When you have unread announcements, the number of them will be displayed in a red dot in the Main Menu, next to the Announcements tool. Clicking that tool will take you to the Announcements page, and initially show all your unread announcements.
To read an announcement, click it in the list.
You can leave comments on an announcement by scrolling to the bottom and using the comment form that's there.
Writing Announcements
There are two ways to write an announcement: either doing it from the main Announcements page and then choosing which groups to share it with, or doing it from within a group's announcement page to have it automatically be shared with that group.
To write an announcement from the main Announcements page:
- Click Announcements in the Main Column.
- Click the "+" button at the top of the Announcements Menu Column
- When the new, empty announcement appears, type in a title and use the lined area to write your announcement.
- You can add images and video to an announcement in the same way that you can in a Journal post:
- To include an image, find an image that's already uploaded to the web (either on CAGD or elsewhere) and copy its URL either by ctrl-clicking or right-clicking on it and choosing "Copy Image Address", or opening the image up separately and copying its address from the main address bar in your browser. Then paste that address into your announcement and press the Return key.
- To include a video (for example, from YouTube), find the video's embed code from the website that it's on, and paste that into your announcement.
- Save you announcement when it is written by clicking the Save icon (the floppy disk at the top). It should turn from blue to black.
It's useful to think of announcements as being like notices that you would post up in a studio. Writing the announcement is like creating the notice, but the act of sharing it with a group (i.e. sticking it on the wall) is what actually posts it.
To share an announcement with a group:
- In the furthest right hand column of an announcement -- the one titled "Groups" -- click the "+" to open the Drawer.
- Click the Home icon at the top of the Drawer to show a list of all groups in your Home, or use the Bookmark icon or Search icon to load your bookmarked groups or the search tool.
- Locate the group you want to post the announcement to, and click the "+" next to it to add it to the list.
This works on announcements you haven't written yourself, meaning that you can pass announcements on to groups that you are staff in, if you think it is of relevance to your students.
You can also remove groups that you are staff in, if you feel that your group has been added to an announcement in error.
Writing an announcement from within a group's announcements page is exactly the same process, except that the group will already be added to the list.
In each case, the announcement won't be available to the intended groups until you have saved it, that is, if it is still in its blue "draft" state.
Seeing all Announcements That You Have Written.
The link on the main Announcements page called "From You" will take you to a list of all of the announcements that you have written yourself. It's easy to see there which ones are still drafts, and also which have comments. Announcements that have new comments that you haven't read yet will have a number in a red dot indicating how many comments are unread next to them.
At the time of writing this, unfortunately these numbers don't update automatically. You have to refresh the list to see any changes to them.