Communicating with Your Students in Canvas

Posted on by

inbox

Sending email messages to your students

Canvas has a Conversations system that allows you to message students.  Students receive notifications of those messages based on their notification preferences.  By default, everyone’s notification of a new conversation message is via their St. Edward’s email.  To open Conversations, click on the “Inbox” link in the upper right corner, next to your name.

115 – Conversations Overview from Canvas LMS on Vimeo.

Students can choose whether or not they want to receive e-mails notifications of the Message/Conversation sent to them in Canvas.  They could, potentially, choose not to receive any e-mails at all and receive all communications via text message, for example.  Also, users can choose the frequency of those e-mails, text messages, etc. (Right away, Daily, Weekly, Not at all).

  • If your course is not published, students will not receive a notification of an announcement or any other messages from Canvas.
  • Students who have not accepted their course invitations will not receive any notifications from Canvas.
  • Even if the course is published and students have accepted their course invitations, they will only receive notifications according to how they have set their notification preferences in their personal settings.

All Canvas Messages are stored in Canvas so they are part of the course record. Below are links to helpful Canvas resources on using the Conversation system.

Announcements

Instructors can send out announcements to their class via the Announcements tool. Students will be notified according to their notification preferences.

By default students can comment on Announcements, just as they can in a discussion.  Once you have created an Announcement, you can close the Announcement to comments, by clicking on the gear icon to the right of the Edit button.

How to make an announcement: https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-1807

519 – Announcements Overview from Canvas LMS on Vimeo.