Announcements cluttering up student to-do list

[montgjoa]

I just went into student view and noticed some issues with the usability of the to-do list. Announcements appear in the to-do list. This isn't necessarily a problem, but: 

• The list is in chronological order, so old announcements are at the top--there's no priority given to items that are due in the next week, for instance
• The list doesn't show that there's additional stuff not shown at the bottom, including upcoming assignments--there's no "show more" or anything like that
• Reading announcements doesn't remove them from the list; you have to manually click the "x" for each one 
• There's only a slight visual distinction between announcements and assignments (the little icon to the left), so you can't scan the list and immediately pick out 

Putting all that together, if a student is not actively "x"-ing announcements on a regular basis, the to-do list will quickly become useless. I've included a screenshot of the to-do list from my course's student view, taken on September 13. A lot of my students didn't realize that an assignment was due yesterday, and I'm wondering if this is why. 

Is there a way to not post announcements to the to-do list or otherwise keep them from cluttering up the to-do list?