Allow Annotation of PDF Documents Directly In The Canvas App

[michael_berg]

  This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

  Idea will be open for vote Wed. October 7, 2015 - Wed. January 6, 2016  Learn more about voting...

I recently saw an archived idea (listed at the end of this listing). I am sad to see that it was archived with only 42 votes (I just leaned about voting today...brand new here). I would like to reemphasize a use case.

In today's paperless classroom it is useful to gather information from students through writing. Specifically in the K-12 arena, where we still sometimes ask students to fill out worksheets to show certain level of mastery of fact based work such as mathematics and grammar. While K-12 education should be striving to change from multiple choice tests and simple drill and kill to cognitive mastery, there are still cases where this type of assignment can be useful at reemphasizing skills. Furthermore, while speed grader does give the ability to the teacher to quickly click through rubrics or embed notes there are times teachers would like to "write" directly on student submissions. Adding in an annotation feature helps in both of these situations. Annotation features could also be used for signatures of documents passed back and forth for things such as field trips and other permission based files teachers may wish to send home with students.

For younger children especially, it is hard to advocate for using separate apps. Having one application that does viewing of pdf files and annotation would cut down tremendously on downtime used to submit and view documents. It would also tie well with the offline files feature that Canvas has already implemented for uses where internet is not reliable or homes which have no internet.

I would like to see the archived idea reopened for a vote. There are many competing products out that already do this sort of annotation. Our school is actually moving from a different product to Canvas because we want a more full blown LMS for online courses in the future. My teachers are all still under beginning phases of training and would all vote for the feature if it were opened up again. That would be 80+ more votes for implementation.

Student assignment annotation on mobile by Hilary Scharton

  Comments from Instructure

For more information, take a look at the release notes:

Canvas by Instructure Release Notes (iOS 3.15)

Canvas by Instructure Release Notes (Android 5.5) 

[applem]

I had the same issue with images while I was beta-testing 3.15

[GideonWilliams]

Struggling to get the resubmission feature to work with the app. Has anyone managed to get this to work successfully?

Also, how do you see the Notes feature when marking if you add them to an image eg arrow?

[bkraus]

It would definitely be awesome if it worked beyond PDFs. The file types are extremely different though. Luckily, Word docs can be exported to PDFs.

For now, we recommend that teachers use the export feature in Word itself to save in PDF format and use those in Canvas if they want this functionality. However, exporting can happen on our side too. The next step is to look at converting the word doc to a PDF on our side, which is doable. I'll definitely play around with it to see if we can get it to work!

[bkraus]

I'm not entirely sure that I follow what is being asked here regarding the notes feature. Can you expound on that?

There are some issues with submitting - we are looking into those now.

[GideonWilliams]

When you add in an arrow for example, you can also add in some notes which then appear as a small speech bubble. I cannot seem to be able to view those notes when reading the submission on Crocadoc..

[rrepka]

This is a nice feature on mobile ... but why hasn't it been enabled for touch screen laptops?  I have a lenovo computer and can't use the touch-screen in speed grader.  This is a much bigger area to write math equations than me using a tiny phone screen.

[Renee_Carney]

Thank you to  @michael_berg  for submitting this idea, as well as,  @KristinL ​,  @amber_depetro ​,  @pwalsh ​,  @clong ​, swhite​, roy_kamada​, mikescheid​,  @csiwinski ​, theresamchugh​,  @henrcy ​,  @marthazumack ​,  @bconner ​, srea​, petern​,  @bsnelearning ​, rowlandl​, blangston​, &  @bdoriot   for your contributions. Your investment in this idea helped refine a feature which is now part of Canvas!

[smurphy1]

Were you able to get the resubmission to work? Our teachers would like the students to make corrections to the original submission and we were wondering what the work flow for that is (or if there is one at this point).

[blangston]

Some time in early 2016 I came across a comment that pointed me to the website www.ducksoup.us which is a great tool for math teachers. Why can't canvas come up with a similar feature that would be extremely helpful for math teachers. That way we will not have to use an additional website for our classes.