hypothesis
When viewing a student in SpeedGrader and the non-Canvas grading bar, instructors should be able to re-hide conversations they've revealed
Edit: The original idea in this feature request was to float the filter for easy toggling. That may be the correct approach if there are other filter-based workflows that involve a lot of toggling, but it was the downside of making us figure out what happens when you reveal a bunch of annotations above the point in the Sidebar where you currently are.
Alternately, this specific fix might be better served by making it possible to re-hide threads using the same/similar button you clied on to expose them while grading.
What happens?
When grading an individual student we use the filter in the Sidebar to show only their annotations:
When scrolling down that filter moves out of view:
What should happen instead?
The filter should remain accessible, even when scrolling through the Sidebar. It should remain at the top of your view of the Sidebar even as you scroll down through the annotations.
Why?
When grading students it's helpful to expose the context of their annotations in light of the annotations of other students. You can do this by turning the filter on and off, or by clicking the "Show more in conversation" button, but even in the latter case to reset those buttons after exposing the conversations you need to click the filter again.
When grading students with many annotations it's difficult to keep scrolling back up, clicking on the filter, and scrolling back down to wherever you were in the Sidebar.
This makes sense and is probably quite easy to implement. The terminology used in web interfaces for elements that don't scroll with the content is that they are "sticky" (as in, they stick to the top of the view).
Rob notes that if you have a floating filter and you un-toggle it the contents of annotations above where you are suddenly get revealed.
The current objection is around toggling the filter during grading, and a better fix might be allow users to re-hide the threads under the "Show x more in conversation" buttons.
We should also examine if there are other filter use cases in the LMS and web apps that might be better served by the floating filter idea.