Canvas gives you two tools to contact students – Announcements & Inbox Messages. In both cases, your course MUST BE PUBLISHED in order for students to receive the messages and notifications.
Sending announcements is easy.
- Click on the Announcements menu,
- click +announcement,
- give title & body,
- and click SAVE at the bottom.
This action will send email notifications to your students as long as they have not turned the notification off. If you need to receive a confirmation email, please go to your notification settings under the account settings menu (or View Course notifications to change the setting for only one course). The announcement notification will be sent to the members of your course.
You can also send “Conversations.” Canvas calls their messaging method “Conversations” and you use the tool called Inbox on the Global Navigation Bar. You can control who receives the message with this tool. You can choose the entire course, a section, a group, an individual, etc. Please review the Canvas article on this tool for detailed explanations.