Thursday, July 18, 2013

New Attendance tool in Canvas!

Many of you will notice a new Attendance button on the left in your courses.  Attendance uses a system called "Roll Call".  Canvas will calculate the percentage your students are there based on what you click and include it in their total score.



When you first click the button in each course, you'll you'll be asked to "Log in".  Once in the system, you'll see a list of all your students.  You can click "Mark all present" then click on the students that are absent or late.  There's also a grid-view so you can set up a seating chart to take attendance (or so you can learn your students' names!).


The system allows you to set the percent a late arrival is worth, but it's for the whole course (we can't set this for individual tardies yet).  After logging in, you also get a new item in Assignments and a new column in Grades.  Students will not see the Attendance button, just their grade.  You can run a report that gets emailed to you though.  This may have a line item you can share with the student.

This feature is brand new, so I don't know all the ins and outs of it yet.  For example, I'm not sure how the grading works in the final percentage yet.  I think you be able to set the total points for attendance in Assignments and then Canvas will divide the number of days into the points available, giving the percentage.  


This fall will be the first semester using Attendance and be an learning experiment of sorts though.  These guides give more information though:

http://guides.instructure.com/s/2204/m/4152/l/107406-how-do-i-configure-the-roll-call-attendance-tool-for-my-course
[Toward the top, click the link after "NEXT:" to go to the next guide... there are 6 total.  This picture shows this location.]






I'm interested to hear your feedback about the system.  Feel free to let me know, or leave a comment below!