Inserting Announcements into Your Home Page (Using RSS & HTML)

This is courtesy of Robert Kelley, PhD, Canvas Community.

Steps for Inserting Announcements into Your Home Page (Using RSS & HTML)

  • First, you need to create an minimum of one announcement
  1. Open your course
  2. Click on Announcements
  3. Click create announcement (if you don't already have one)
  4. Once you've created an announcement view your course in student view
  5. Once in the student view open the announcement tab
  6. Right click on the RSS icon & select "copy link address"
  7. Paste link into notepad, you will need it for the next steps.
  1. Create your free account (e.g., can login with Facebook or Google); otherwise, may impact results below
  2. Paste the link into the 'Feed URL' box on the left hand side
  3. Click the 'Plus' button (to the right of where you pasted the URL)
  4. Adjust General Settings to suit (e.g., set height to 395; keep width as 'responsive')
  5. Click the green 'Get Code' at the top right of the page
  6. Click on the 'Try this if it doesn't work' link
  7. Click on the bottom 'Copy Code' button
  8. Paste the code into a safe place to keep it temporarily (e.g., Notepad or Word app)
  • Go to your Canvas Home Page (or anywhere else you wish to add the announcements)
  1. Edit the page (e.g., Home Page)
  2. Place a row of x's where you'd like the announcements to go (e.g., xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
  3. Switch the HTML by clicking on the link 'HTML Editor'
  4. !! Copy all of the HTML code and paste it somewhere as a backup of your existing page (e.g., in the Notepad or Word app).
  5. Copy the Feedwind code (from wherever you temporarily stored it)
  6. Highlight the row of x's (e.g., xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) on the Canvas page (in HTML view), and paste over it the Freedwind code. (e.g., then, in rich text editor view, drag and resize the Announcement box to 400 and width to 640; note, the announcements width will still shrink to accommodate smaller screens if width was set to 'responsive' on Feedwind)
  7. Save the page

First Note:  In addition to making a copy of the HTML for your entire Canvas page...   I'd recommend also saving the HTML code below wherever you post the announcements, and then after you save the page, re-open it, go into HTML view, and then paste that HTML code below the announcement.  This is helpful, because the code below the announcements will likely be removed when Canvas 'cleans the HTML' code.

 

Second Note: Below is a 4 minute "walk through" for adding announcements to your Home Page (using the Feedwind widget).  It has a few modifications to the above directions, to create a better result.