Feature Highlight – Announcements and Messaging

You’ve got an important announcement for your students. Maybe you already posted it to your classroom page, and sent out an email. Even wrote it on the board in class.

But if you want to be extra sure they see it, you also want to pop it in front of them while they’re working through the games on PersonalFinanceLab. This is where our Announcements and Messages come in!

Introducing Announcements and Messages

Announcements and Messages are an on-site way to communicate with your students on PersonalFinanceLab.

Using Announcements

An “Announcement” is a message that appears for every page for students while they use the site, appearing at the top right of every page.

Announcements can be text, images, links, or all three. They stay on the page for as long as you have the announcement active. This means Announcements are a great way to remind your students of important things coming up, but also to give recognition to banks or credit unions that sponsored your class’s site license!

Teachers can post Announcements from their Admin menu. Go to “Admin” -> “Post A Message” to post your announcement.

Messages

Messages are another communication tool built into PersonalFinanceLab. The messaging center is an inbox for every student. Students can access their inbox through the message icon next to their username at the top of the page.

If students have unread messages, it will have a flashing indicator here, and on their Dashboard when logging in.

Students using the Stock Game will regularly get system messages about important events in their portfolio – like a stock they are holding issued a dividend or had a split. Students can also manage some of their inquiries to our Technical Support team through the messaging center when Live Chat or Email are not available.

But teachers can also send messages to their full class about important dates and announcements too!

Sending Messages

Teachers can send a message to their class from the Registration File report. Simply go to “Reports” -> “Registration”, and near the top of the page there is a button to “Message All Users”.

Just like email, you will set a subject line and the content of the message, then send! The Messaging System also accepts HTML content, if you want to include things like pictures or links in the message you send (if you aren’t sure how to write HTML, no problem – our support team can help)!

The Bottom Line

Posting Announcements and sending Messages are just one of the many tools teachers have available to reach their students on PersonalFinanceLab, along with their other courseware messaging systems. But it can be an important way to recognize sponsors, or give information you want your students to see explicitly while playing the games.

Starting in Fall 2023, students can also use the Messaging Center to manage their support tickets, removing the need for email entirely – an important improvement to protecting student data privacy. And speaking of privacy – only teachers and our staff can send messages or modify announcements – students cannot directly send messages to each other.

Let us know if you have questions about Announcements or Messages, and good luck this semester!

-The PFinLab Team