Speedgrader Tools not showing

[mark_anderson]

Hi all,

I've experienced a small but annoying problem with assignments in Canvas.

I delivered a presentation to my staff on Monday about the joys and wonders of Speedgrader, especially the ability to use the feedback tools directly on student submissions. 

Lo and behold, I come to give feedback this morning on drafts that students submitted last night, and the tools aren't showing at all. I can't figure out how to make them appear, and no Canvas guides (that I can find) even mention the toolbar at all. I was using it perfectly on Monday with no issues on a different submission, but now, nothing!

Do Speedgrader tools get removed if the assignment has an attached rubric? If so, that doesn't make sense. As a teacher you should be able to correct specific parts of a task as well as using an overall rubric.

Help would be appreciated. This is extremely frustrating, especially when it works on a different task. 

Cheers,

Mark

[arking]

Unfortunately, I think students have to submit a file to use the editing and markup tools, anything beyond commenting on the side. The tools are not enabled for text submissions. (I don't know why Instructure doesn't just take text submissions and turn them into pdfs or something...)

[carol_wolf]

My tool bar disappeared when I went to grade the one late assignment for a paper assignment in SpeedGrader. I haven't clicked on peer review settings; in fact, I looked for that button for the assignment, and I don't see it. Anyone know how I can get the toolbar up to grade this paper? Thanks.

[charris4]

Many years later...  Could it be as simple as the fact that you chose to designate this an "ungraded survey" or "practice quiz," both of which are not graded?  So, that would be why your not getting the Speed Grader option.  I just fixed this problem by changing the assignment from a "practice quiz" to a "graded quiz."

[carol_wolf]

Yes. That was it. Thank you.

[karin_molander_]

I just experienced the same thing as in the original post: an essay assignment with anonymous peer reviews, and the tools do not show up when I come to comment and mark this first draft. It is now 2020; how is it possible that this problem, noted in 2017, has not yet been solved? 

[pecchiog]

Hi there. I'm just asking (not assuming)--this essay submission was a file attachment as submission type, correct? 

[karin_molander_]

Yes, sorry, should have specified. A regular file submission. I got both pdfs and wordfiles.

Best regards,

Karin

Karin Molander Danielsson, Ph. D.

Senior Lecturer in English

School of Education, Culture and Communication

Mälardalen university

Västerås, SWEDEN

[pecchiog]

And you are using peer reviews and anonymous grading, yes?

[karin_molander_]

Only anonymous peer reviews, not anonymous grading (by me).

I am starting to think that this is a huge misunderstanding on my part; that I am not supposed to have assignments with both peer review and teacher feedback?

Best regards,

Karin

Karin Molander Danielsson, Ph. D.

Senior Lecturer in English

School of Education, Culture and Communication

Mälardalen university

Västerås, SWEDEN

[pecchiog]

Not at all. First--disclaimer--I am an LMS admin who was an ELA instructor for years, but not currently an instructor. My knowledge base in the bast usually came from my own experience as an instructor. With that said, I think peer review and teacher feedback is an important combination. Would it work if you turned off the peer feedback feature after all reviews have been made, and then utilized the speedgrader tools, then tried to turn it back on? I'm asking--not stating. Also--a workaround (not a nice one) would be to create a duplicate assignment worth zero or one point(s). Take the peer review off of this one and use this as your place for teacher comments. You could title the assignments differently so it's clear to students: "Teacher Reviewed Draft" & "Peer Reviewed Draft." Yes this would take up another place in your gradebook and would require students to submit twice, but that's a small price to pay for the feedback. 

Does anyone know if this is something Canvas has worked on for a fix or if it's a feature request currently? Sorry Karin--you probably already thought of these things. I'm just thinking aloud here!

[karin_molander_]

George, thank you so much for those suggestions. The first one sounds possible, but what will happen to the peer reviews already given? Will those rubrics and comments still be visible if and when I do turn off peer review in Edit?  I am marking now, or trying to, so the second option is not viable for this assignment at least.  In fact, I had to resort to downloading and commenting in Word,  but that created a new problem ( which generated another question, I am afraid, because I don't see how I can save my comments without changing the filename and thus making it impossible to upload all the essays together). Anyway, I am doing things the old Blackboard way now, downloading, saving and uploading individually. 

[pecchiog]

Yikes. DLing in word. I would recommend if you are taking it to that level, perhaps using the audio feedback in Canvas would be easier and more effective. Or even using a screencast to evaluate each paper. Then just post the link to the screencast. 

I don't know what it would do to the comments, but speaking from my other experience in Canvas, if it did delete anything, it would be "hidden" not "deleted" so you could just toggle it back on. Can an admin weigh in on this though? I would hate for you to lose anything. 

In my experience grading/reviewing written submissions, audio feedback was a more efficient and helpful way of guiding students. When I relied on marked feedback, typically it would lead to more questions for me to respond to, and then me repeating the same things when they had forgotten. This is also why I like screencasts--I wish Canvas somehow had a screencast feedback feature but that is a pretty big ask. 

[pecchiog]

Also--is there a reason you have to use Word instead of Google docs? 

[karin_molander_]

Haha, I wasn't aware that Google docs would be any easier to use, or how to use it in Canvas... so... ignorance? We do have access to Word Online but I haven't figured out how to use that with assignments? About how to comment, I would love to investigate other methods at some point, but comments in Word is what I've used for 20 years or more. My (Swedish) students write essays and papers in English, and are helped by local comments on sentence structure and lack of cohesion etc., as well as more global issues on literary theory and what have you, so audio does not seem practical, although I might be wrong. I doubt that it would be guicker for me to do this on a screencast; do you mean by annotating it somehow? I have a lot to learn, I realise that! 🙂 Thank you so much for trying to help! I don't dare do the toggling of peer review settings since this assignment is due back in a few days and I canät afford to mess things up at this stage, but I will try it out with something less urgent. Thanks again!

Karin

[pecchiog]

Sorry Karin. I tend to provide a thousand options when people are working on something--which can be overwhelming for them! The advantage to Google Docs would be that you and other students could all comment on the same paper at the same time in Canvas. The comments would NOT be anonymous though. The nice part is that students could provide annotiations and comments there, and you would see them in Canvas where you could still use speedgrader. Screencasts are really valuable as a tool. If I can ever help, email me! pecchiog@mhs-pa.org 

[carol_wolf]

I have a final paper to grade today. I opened Speed Grader and my tools for adding comments to students' work, etc., are not showing. I have read a number of the answers here for this problem, but I never added peer reviews. I went and added them and then un-added them, just to see if that would help, but it didn't. Is there any other way to make the tools show up? How do I write up a ticket for this?

[erinhmcmillan]

Carol,

In your Global Navigation Menu, click the Help link (it may be renamed, but it's the last icon at the bottom of the main left sidebar). Your institution should have a process for submitting a problem with Canvas. The default is Report a Problem, but yours may say something different. Follow those instructions, and make sure you submit the specific URL of the SpeedGrader assignment you're looking at.

Erin

[vbertsch]

I have a similar problem.  Within the same assignment, while speed grading, some jpg show the annotation tool bar and some do not.  And it's for different students each time!?!

[ellenweller]

I have this issue as well. Occasionally I will have a student submit a PDF, and ONE will not only be unavailable to use the writing tools to annotate, but I can't even see it in the Speed Grader, although I can see it in the Canvas Teacher App on my iPad. No option for the annotation tools.  I have been submitting tickets repeatedly to Canvas for another issue, and have received NO response.

[omahahomeschool]

Here was the reason that my tools did not appear:

Text Entry [1]: Students can submit their assignment directly in the Rich Content Editor. DocViewer annotations are not available for text entry submissions. Additionally, text entry submissions cannot be re-uploaded to the Gradebook.

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-create-an-online-assignment/ta-p/950

[jnilebarnes]

ANOTHER PROBLEM. If you select the upload type "Text Entry" when creating the assignment (instead of, or in addition to, PDF, DOC, etc). The Text Entries cannot be graded with the SpeedGrader DocViewer Tools. Guess who just learned this the hard way. And since I built the asynchronous course components this way, I have multiple assignments with this problem and many (most) students have submitted their essays this way. 

[sheltohp]

I had the problem of not seeing the grading tools but had not set anything to blind peer review. The problem was that there was an up/down toggle button that needed to be toggled down to see the tools. I don't know why I never had that problem before but just posting here in case that was the issue for anyone.

[KeriSalyards]

Here we are in September 2024 and the "peer reviews appear anonymously" setting is STILL turning off SpeedGrader tools. Please fix this, Instructure!

[BrettBaker]

I had this issue too. I was marking assignments (uploads, PDF or DOCX) in speedgrader, no peer review. Annotation tools were sometimes visible, sometimes not visible, sometimes they briefly showed up (like for 50 milliseconds) before disappearing. Sometimes (and this is what clued me in), the tools were there one day, and then the next day had disappeared *for the same student's submission* that I hadn't finished marking. I was using Firefox on a Mac. I switched to Chrome: annotation tools have reappeared.