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) 

[peytoncraighill]

Note: Annotations for the SpeedGrader app are in closed beta for iOS right now, release date TBA, with Android development set to begin soon.

There aren't currently any plans to bring this functionality into the Canvas app, or Canvas web for that matter. Some workarounds have been mentioned for the time-being, though I understand it's less than ideal and probably confusing to bounce youngsters between apps for annotations. I'm happy to look into the benefits and constraints we might face with this solution.

Thanks for your contributions! Keep them coming.

[marthazumack]

That's brilliant--our instructors have been wanting to be able to annotate on mobile devices ever since there was an app!

[Renee_Carney]

If you are following this idea, you may also want to follow and bookmark this doc:

Canvas Studio: Mobile Annotations

[bconner]

Edmodo recently added the ability to markup PDFs inside of the app.  This feature has really made my teacher turn back to edmodo just because it is easier for the students.  Technology should enhance learning, not create additional steps to accomplish the same thing.  

[michael_berg]

Peyton....Thanks and I would love if you all would look into it more. We are trying out the beta of Speedgrader annotations right now. Still a bit buggy but headed in the right direction. I noticed the same set of tools that teachers have in that implementation are available to students that  go into work passed back to them after submission. It doesn't seem like it would be a large leap to bring the tools over into the presubmit area....

[peytoncraighill]

Moving this idea to under consideration for student app updates in the latter half of 2016. This wouldn't happen any sooner than that, and it would likely be implemented in iOS sooner than it would be in Android.

We're in the process of transitioning to a new third-party tool for viewing and annotating PDFs and other documents in mobile, and it's shiny and great, but it currently offers less support for Android than it does for iOS. Specifically, we can't use it to annotate documents in Android yet. Never fear; we've been told to expect additional support for Android in Q3/Q4 of this year.

Which document types would your students be annotating (pdf, docx, pptx, jpeg, etc.)? What's the most common activity associated with student annotations (filling out worksheet, taking quiz, peer review, etc.)?

[bconner]

That is great news! We are currently a 1:1 Ipad district so the iOS support would fit us perfect. We would use it mostly for work sheets. We currently use different apps to accomplish this task by "app smashing". Using the "open in" feature to get it into an annotator and then getting it back into canvas. We really would like the ability to write or type on these documents.

I was recently exposed to a really neat website that allows off mark ups and then grades it for you. It was created by a local instructional technologist from another school district. It is really designed for the Google platform, which we do not use. It may be worth taking a look at. The website is www.ducksoup.us<http://www.ducksoup.us>. There are some great features in there.

I am super excited about the future possibilities of canvas. This is our first year with the adoption and it has been great. I really enjoy the product.

Thanks again,

Brian Conner

Sent from my iPad

[bconner]

I just realized that I did not include the document type. We have trained our teachers to use PDF if possible so a majority of time they are using PDF’s. Those others would be nice, but PDF’s represent our biggest need.

Thanks,

[mikescheid]

We are also very excited about this development!  It seems odd to me that we are talking a lot about iOS and the use on the ipad but there is no mention of the iWork apps. We also have trained our users to use PDF as much as possible but this is mostly because the apps they are using to create the content are not supported by canvas. Namely Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. I would love to see support for these formats along with PDF, JPG, and the other standard formats.

Looking forward to seeing this sooner than later.

Are you able to share what your new 3rd party is for this feature?

[michael_berg]

Thank you for looking into it more! Our teachers would use the functionality for PDF worksheets and Peer review of other docs if available. With that said, being able to annotate on a slideshow (Keynote/PP) and doc files would be amazing too. The number one though at the moment is PDF files. We have had a few that also did written testing this way in the past.