Annotation Timestamps

[DaisyDeng]

I have a student who uploaded a PDF file which contains several textboxes using the Canvas DocViewer Annotation tool. I can't confirm if the annotations were made before or after the assignment due date. Is there a way to view the timestamps of when these annotations were first created? Thanks.

[James · Accepted solution]

@DaisyDeng 

There is a way. I'll explain how to do this in Chrome, but similar approaches work for other browsers.

1. Open SpeedGrader.
2. Open your Browser's Developer Tools. This is F12, but you can also get it by right-clicking and choosing Inspect.
3. Switch to the Network tab.
4. Select Fetch/XHR. If this option isn't available, you may need to click on the Filter icon (shown in Blue on the line immediately below the menu line).
5. In the Filter search box, type annotations.

Here's what it should look like at this point.

6. Navigate through to find a student that has an annotation. If you were on that student to start with, you can either reload the page or navigate off and then back to that student. You will see the word annotations appear appear in the table below the header.
7. Click on the name annotations and a panel will open on the right side.
8. Switch to the Preview tab if it isn't already there.
9. The preview screen has a navigable explorer, but you may be able to find exactly what you're looking without doing anything.

I can see that this annotation was created at 2025-10-06T05:30:29.036Z. That's given in UTC time so you'll need to adjust it for your timezone. I'm in Central Daylight Saving Time (CDT) right now, so that's UTC-5. That means it was created at 12:30 am.

If you don't see the created_at, just click on Data to expand it. Sometimes it shows and sometimes it doesn't.

Regardless of whether it shows the created_at or not, make sure you expand. There may be more than one annotation and you'll only get one unless you expand. It seems Canvas sends them based on the type (drawings come before text) rather than the order they were created in. It's safest to expand the data object and get the list of all of the annotations and when they were created.

Looking at these, I can see that the first annotation object in the list was created at 12:30 am on October 6, but there was another one created at 12:44 am on October 6, and the third one was created at 6:16 pm on August 25, 2024. The first comment is the one with the oldest timestamp.

You can click on any of those numbers to expand and find more details. The specifics depend on whether it was a text comment or a drawing. There is a modified_at timestamp, which would let you know if the object was edited after it was created. You can tell by looking which ones are text comments.

In this one, my created_at and modified_at are the same timestamp, so I did not come back and edit it later.

There is no flag for whether an annotation was deleted. If you delete an annotation, it no longer shows up in the list of annotations. If a student deletes an annotation, I don't have a way to get that information.

[dbrace]

Thank you for this, @James.

For anyone coming across this afterwards or just in general, I use https://www.timestamp-converter.com and its "ISO 8601" section as a way to convert UTC times.

-Doug