Communication

The Announcements tool is used to inform site participants about current items of interest. Announcements can have multiple attachments, such as documents or URLs. Announcements tool on My Workspace lets you see announcements from all the sites to which you belong. Announcements are a useful way to post a notice about an important change in deadlines, meeting times, or meeting locations. When creating an announcement, you can make it visible, hide it, or you can set a beginning date and ending date for the announcement's visibility. You can sort announcements by subject, sender, access, or date. Announcements are posted to a course or project site. Site owners and instructors can choose to have an announcement automatically sent via email to all site participants.

The Drop Box feature allows instructors and students to share documents within a private folder for each student. The Drop Box works like Resources to allow you to upload many types of files and many files at a time. The Drop Box also allows nested folders (folders within folders). Instructors can use the Drop Box tool to provide private progress reports to each student in the class. You cannot revise the contents of a document or file within a Drop Box. Instructors will be able to know about recent changes to the drop box when they see an orange star highlighting Drop Box folders that have recently been updated. An automatic email notification can be set when a new item is added to the drop box.

Mailtool allows user to send an email message to site participants. Also it provides WYSIWYG editing, file attachment, group/section-aware recipient selection, and a field for specifying non-site participant email addresses. Files can be attached from your computer in the e-mails you sent.

The Messages tool is a communication tool that allows site participants to communicate using internal course mail. Using Messages, you can send messages to another individual, a select number of individuals, or a select number of groups. Messaging between groups is also supported. Messages send using the To Recipients' Email Address (es) option are sent directly to participants' email addresses and are not stored in the Messages area. A WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface allows rich text, plain text, and HTML editing to compose messages. You can add attachments and also copy and paste from Microsoft Word Document using Paste from Word icon or using the keyboard shortcut Cmd-v/Ctrl-v.

The News tool is an RSS "news aggregator" (or "news reader") that reads and displays content from RSS “news feeds”. The News tool uses RSS to bring dynamic news to your worksite. RSS is a data format used to syndicate news on the web. It allows continuously updated content from a remote news site to appear in another website. To set up your worksite to display news, you must specify a URL pointing to RSS news feed. Sites that distribute news in RSS format are called "news feeds". You can add more than one News feed when you set up the site, or at a later time.

The Poll tool allows users to set up an online vote. Users can vote for one or more of any number of answer options. The structure of the vote is governed by a maximum and minimum number of options that may be selected. Poll results can be made available immediately, after voting, after the closing date, or never. Voting is anonymous and participants may only vote once per poll. The poll tool allows you to create, edit and delete polls and also view the results of polls you created in percentage and figures. A poll can only consist of one question. If you want to ask a set of related questions it might be better to use the Tests and Quizzes tool. You can control who may or may not vote, as well as who may create, edit and delete polls.

The Roster tool allows you to view the names, photos, and profiles of site participants. A count of site participants is also displayed. Members of specific groups or sections can also be viewed as well as personalized photos that participants of your site have uploaded using the Roster tool.