What is Classroom Attendance Tracker?
This is a tool that was developed because of the need to take student attendance during Remote Learning of the COVID-19 Pandemic. This is a tool that will allow you to automatically create an attendance tracker, create daily attendance forms for the days that you would like to capture daily attendance, schedule announcements in a Google Classroom class from your choice. When the tool is functioning, using Google Classroom students will get an announcement at 8:00am on the date that the form was created for. Students will have one choice to mark their attendance, and the forms used to collect attendance will capture student g-suite accounts, then using a series of importrange and vlookup formulas you will be able to have a running list with percentages of who is present or who is absent from remote learning!
Why does this exist?
As all schools in NY were forced to shift to remote learning, schools were asked to find a way to check student attendance, and ensure that students are interacting with the school through Google Classroom. Working in NYCDOE schools every teacher completes a Period attendance, and the one class completes the School daily attendance form. If you work in NYCDOE this is the attendance bubble sheets you fill in per period and the one extra you complete during the day.
If a student is marked absent or late on the official school attendance the system will work with ATS and school messenger to automatically notify parents that the student is absent or late to school. This tool was developed to work as the official school attendance form and simulate the method for making those automatic outreach calls.
What this tool is for...
This tool is to automate the creation of an attendance tracker that is currently being used for several schools in NYCDOE during remote learning. This is meant to simplify its roll-out and make it easier for schools to monitor if students are interacting with the school through answering a Google Form
When partnered with tools such as the FormLimiter Add-on you can have your forms automatically shut down on the day they are sent out at a time you select.
What this tool is NOT for...
This tool is not a fully automatic attendance solution, it still requires some user input and direction. As we are trying to monitor students and make outreach if they are not engaging in Remote learning you will need monitor your student attendance and make outreach if students are not participating.
This tool is not a method of sending out very involved or overly complicated forms. In order to monitor student interaction we designed this tool to be a simple one question form. We know that as you provide people an avenue to make mistakes in data entry they will. This is why the forms created by this are meant to be as simple as possible.
How does this work?
This tool works by leveraging some of the built in features of G-Suite for Education. We are going to be using Google Sheets, Google Forms, and Google Classroom.
We are using Google Sheets to develop an official attendance tracker and run the tools. All student attendance responses on google forms will automatically populate their corresponding daily tab at the bottom of the spreadsheet after you “allow access.” This is using a formula called importrange.
When you install this add-on to google sheets on your first run it will create a tab called Attendance, with column headers and formulas pre-populated, a tab called Links, with column headers pre-populated, and a hidden sheet called idForAttendance, this is there to act as a reference for troubleshooting the tool should you run into issues with the tracker. This tab will log the indicator that you pressed (email or id number) to create your forms and the google classroom unique id number that you are using to schedule announcements.
We are using Google Forms to have students indicate their daily attendance. This tool will automatically create attendance forms for each day that you indicate on the Links tab of your attendance tracker spreadsheet. Each form is set to Limit to one response, capture student email address, and require login to your G-Suite domain.
When this tool creates your forms, forms will be created with two questions per day. This depends on if you are tracking by ID number or email. If you are tracking by email the form will ask for the student name and a multiple choice question with one choice Present . As this is meant to take only attendance, let this tool only collect attendance (translation: keep the forms for attendance as easy as possible!). Based on responses to forms the attendance tracker is built with specific formulas. As of right now it only is coded for English terms Present and Absent. If you need to edit the forms you will have to edit your formulas at different locations on the Attendance Sheet.
When you are ready, you will be able to select a class from Google Classroom and schedule announcements to be published in the class with the attendance form. You must be a teacher in the class you are trying to schedule the daily announcements.