This module walks you through how to create and use a read-only #announcements channel for clear and effective communication with your class. You can leverage this channel to serve as a one-stop-shop for students to access key information throughout the semester, ranging from homework reminders and course expectations to course materials and online resources.

Channel Creation

Follow these steps to create an #announcements channel for your server:

1. Double-click below existing channels in your server, or press the plus sign icon next to the channel under which you want the #announcements channel to be located
   • The higher up, the better. It is crucial to foreground this channel so that students know where to locate essential course info throughout your server
2. Select Create New Channel
3. Name the channel #announcements
4. Click the gear icon to the right of the channel to edit it
5. Select permissions
6. Toggle the disallow for this text channel permission: Send Messages 
7. Press Save Changes

Model Uses

See below for some of the model ways in which you can put an #announcements channel to use in your classroom server.

1. Course Expectations: for communicating your expectations to students regarding upcoming assignments and homework parameters as well as anticipated in-class activities.
2. Homework Reminders: for reiterating homework deadlines and parameters drawn from your week-by-week schedule for the course. At the end of every class, you can post homework reminders in the #announcements channel to keep momentum going into subsequent classes.
3. Syllabus Updates: for discussing any revisions or updates that you might make to your syllabus throughout the semester.
4. Sharing Links: for making key links and web content available to students in a centralized space among your server. These might include submission portals, assignment descriptions, and related course content.
5. Uploading Files: for uploading files for in-class activities, assignments, and related course materials in a centralized space among your server.
6. Polling Students: for taking the temperature on student sentiments in relation to ongoing course activities. In order to poll students, you can use emoji reactions and react to your own post one time for each emoji signifying the options of the poll.

Feature Suggestions

Below you will find a series of ways to leverage the features available to you in Discord when making announcements to your class.

1. Role Permissions: Set the role permissions of #announcements so that students can add reactions to your messages. You can use these emoji reactions to infer the relative reach of your messages, which helps in taking the temperature of your class down the line.
2. Role Management: Adding the default @everyone role to your message will send students a push notification, which increases visibility of your message and may also indicate to them that you’ve sent a class-wide announcement.
3. Notification Settings: Students active on Discord may customize their personal notification settings for your classroom server. In particular, they reserve the ability to suppress notifications from certain channels and roles including @mentions, @everyone, and @here. In openly discussing the matter with them, you can suggest that they override their default notification settings for the #announcements channel at minimum. They can do so by adding #announcements to their notification overrides as depicted below.

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