The News tool is a very important part of D2L. It is used to post announcements, reminders, important information, etc. to your students. These news items can be created in advance and set to deploy on a certain date. They can be pinned to the top of the feed, or can be set to disappear. Each user has control over what news they see. Once displayed, users can dismiss news items that they no longer want to see.
If you plan to use the News tool as your primary communication, ask students to set their notifications so they will receive the announcements via email as well as inside of your course. A tutorial for how to do this is included on this page.
Deleting or Re-dating News Items Copied from Another D2L Course