Rotate and Annotate Needs to Return

It seems that the ability for instructors to rotate submissions and then annotate the work has been removed from the SpeedGrader. This is an important workflow for faculty. While they can "require" students to submit work in the proper orientation, the students can not preview the orientation of their work upon submission. Why would you even have a rotation option in the annotation space if you weren't going to then allow the faculty to annotate the properly oriented work?

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jmerlenbach2

I'll second this - we just had an instructor asking about this today.

AFurr

Thankful for your post since I have attempted to report this issue/concern to support with no success. Although we are not currently using the upgraded SpeedGrader in our instance, your post in this group seemed to be the same issue we are encountering in 'classic' SpeedGrader

I reached out to Instructure Support back in Dec. 2025 after faculty contacted me about the issue of 1) rotated submissions not remaining static in SpeedGrader and 2) inability to add annotations after submissions were rotated.

Two reps stated that this was "intended behavior," and I was pointed to this guide with "Pages with annotations cannot be rotated" highlighted.

I explained that I was aware that annotated submissions could not be rotated and reiterated the issues. I shared that the faculty members who reported the issues were seasoned Canvas users, and I also provided a screen recording of the behavior.

The reply to this was "When a document is rotated, annotations are not allowed to ensure they don’t get messed up when the rotation is reset. So to prevent it from ever getting that we it is currently limited to only be annotated in the direction they are uploaded in."

The ticket never left L1 support.