Canvas Attendance guides instructors through recording attendance, managing sections, seating charts, late policies, reports, and attendance grades. It also explains using daily quizzes instead, requiring due dates and automatic zeroes for missing submissions.
Canvas Attendance Tool
Step 1: Navigate to your course and find the "Attendance" tab in the left-hand menu. Click on it.
Step 2: Select the appropriate section of your course. Please note that this only applies to courses that have been merged with another course. For many professors, concurrent students in a -400 section are merged with the main section. If both sections meet at the same time, you will have to choose one section first, note who is present, then filter to the next section, then select who is present.
Step 3: Mark who is present, absent, or excused by clicking on the circles next to their picture and name. Every time you click the circle it switches to the next status.
One tip to make roll call faster is to select "Mark All Present" first, then figure out who is missing. Since it is probable that more students are attending class than missing class, you will save time by sequencing things in this way. Find the missing students, then click the circle next to their name until you see the red circle with a white "x" in it for an unexcused absence.
Step 4: If you want a quick summary of a student's attendance record, locate their name and click on the "more" button.
Step 5: If you desire to have a seating chart to visually assist you in taking attendance, navigate to the "Class" button.
Step 6: Create the seating chart by dragging and dropping student names to where they sit in the class.
Step 7: When finished editing the seating chart, click on "Take Attendance." You'll notice that there is the same "Mark All Present" button that is also present on the list view of students.
If for any reason you need to go back in time and change a student's attendance status for a particular date, you can either click on the back arrow in the upper right hand corner, or you can click on the calendar icon and select the exact date you need to make a change to.
Step 8: Very few professors have time to note whether students are "late" to class. Either they are there when you take attendance or they are not. However, if you do have time and desire to give partial credit to students who are late, you must select the gear icon in the upper right hand corner of the attendance page, then select "Roll Call Settings."
Step 9: After selecting "Roll Call Settings," determine how much credit you want students to receive for a "late" status:
Step 10: If for any reason you need the attendance report for the whole class, you can click on the "Attendance Report" button which you can see under Step 8. It will ask you for the timeframe that you want data for, and it will also ask you for a SIS Student ID. If you desire a report on the whole class, simply leave the SIS Student ID field blank.
Managing the Attendance Grade
When you take roll for the first time, Canvas creates a Roll Call assignment in the Assignments tab worth 100 points. You can change the amount of points attendance is worth, or you can place the Roll Call assignment into a weighted category. The way Canvas calculates the attendance grade is as follows:
Step 1: Click on the "Assignments" tab and locate the Roll Call Attendance line.
Step 2: If you want to change the point value, click on the three dots furthest to the right on the Roll Call Attendance line, then click "edit." From there you will be able to edit the point value.
Step 3: Navigate to your gradebook and you will see your grades for each student.
Daily Quizzes
Instead of using the Attendance function in Canvas, some professors use a daily quiz administered in class. This is an acceptable way of keeping track of student attendance for retention purposes and for Student Success intervention tools, so long as professors follow certain steps.
Step 1: For every daily quiz, ensure the assignment has a due date. As you create the assignment, navigate to the "Assign Access" section and put in the due date as the day of class:
Step 2: Navigate to your gradebook. Click on the gear icon in the upper right hand corner.
Step 3: Make sure that you are on the "Late Policies" tab, which it should automatically default to. Then, click on the box next to "Automatically apply grade for missing submissions." Below that, make sure to put "0" in the "Grade for missing submissions %" box. This ensures that when students do not take your daily quiz, they automatically get a zero, which reflects exactly what it would be like if you were taking attendance and they weren't there.
Comments
0 comments
Please sign in to leave a comment.