{"id":3590,"date":"2016-12-24T22:57:10","date_gmt":"2016-12-25T06:57:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/?p=3590"},"modified":"2025-08-18T13:22:13","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T20:22:13","slug":"canvas-but-cool-embedding-announcements","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/2016\/12\/canvas-but-cool-embedding-announcements\/","title":{"rendered":"Canvas But Cool: Embedding Announcements"},"content":{"rendered":"

I hope to start a series of posts here on things I’m doing in Canvas, but that are cool anyway. Some will be workarounds, some ideas for making things look better, some techniques born out of utter frustration.<\/span><\/p>\n

None will be as brilliant as what Laura Gibbs is doing<\/a> at the University of Oklahoma \u00a0\u2013 she’s got LOL Cats rotating through her Canvas pages using a cool javascript.<\/a> But her work inspires me and encourages me to find things that are Canvas…But Cool<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

My first concerns Announcements. In Moodle (many of my posts will start \u201cIn Moodle\u201d, an approach dreaded by many in the Canvas Community) I could just paste Announcements in at the top of the main page, and copy or adapt them into Latest News for instant emailing to all. In Canvas, the Announcements page is decidedly a separate thing. If I don’t want announcements to be the main Home page, they won’t be obvious except by email or other notifications.<\/span><\/p>\n

But I don’t want to post twice, once in Announcements and once by editing the Home Page. I want the Announcements to dynamically appear on the Home page, where I want them to. So I followed the wonderful instructions posted halfway down this page<\/a>\u00a0at the Canvas Community (I’d love to link directly to the post, but you can’t do that there), posted by Sharmaine Regisford with thanks to others.<\/span><\/p>\n

Instructions:<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

1. First, post an Announcement in your class (I just did a welcome message).<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

2. Grab the feed URL for the announcements by going to the Announcements page and right-clicking on the RSS symbol (it won’t be there if you didn’t post a first Announcement).<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The URL should end with .atom.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

3<\/span><\/span>. Go to\u00a0<\/span><\/span>FeedWind at http:\/\/feed.mikle.com<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

4. In the spot, paste in the feed URL.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

5. Choose your settings. I like 1 feed height, scrollbar on, autoscroll off, text-only, max length 132 characters.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

6. Grab the regular code from the right side, not the iframe code.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

7. Start a new text document on your computer and paste the code.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

8. Save the file as .html. \u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

9. Go to Canvas and open Files. Upload the .html file you just created to your Canvas course files. Once it’s there, mouse over the name of it to find the document number \u2013 write it down somewhere.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

10. Go to the page where you want the Announcements to appear. Switch to HTML editor.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

11. Paste this in:<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\/courses\/#######\/files\/#########\/download<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In this example the first ####### is your course number and the second ######### is the file number. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The course number is in the URL of your Canvas course:<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

So for this example, that would be:<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\/courses\/6660\/files\/57294\/download<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The result is an iframe on your page that will always show the most recent announcement (so long as you chose that on the settings at FeedWind).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Update: As of this week, Canvas provides the option to add announcements to the top of your home page. Not as pretty, but it works:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I hope to start a series of posts here on things I’m doing in Canvas, but that are cool anyway. Some will be workarounds, some ideas for making things look better, some techniques born out of utter frustration. None will be as brilliant as what Laura Gibbs is doing at the University of Oklahoma \u00a0\u2013 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[32,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cmslms","category-how-to"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3590"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3590\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10095,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3590\/revisions\/10095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}