We can’t deny the fact that the Fall of 2020 was the start of a non-traditional educational system. Teaching, learning, evaluation, and attendance, nothing looked the same. Recording students’ attendance is also a challenging task for many teachers as they are not seeing students in person.
In a virtual learning system, a decrease in students’ attendance could mean students are using flexible schedules for learning and to take care of their needs. Moreover, inconsistent attendance could also be due to connectivity issues or due to trouble engaging with schoolwork. Although, several states lower their school attendance requirements this year, teachers need to evaluate students’ attendance. Monitoring attendance will provide insight into the educational experience.
Attendance and other classroom management tasks waste a lot of valuable time that can be used productively. You can replace manual tasks of assignment management, feedback collection, and attendance with comprehensive apps and online systems. You can use an online attendance management system to save a lot of your valuable time. The online attendance system helps you to take online attendance, generate detailed reports, and share those reports with school administration and families.
We have some other effective methods to record students’ attendance in class.
Daily Check-ins At a Single Time
You can ask your students to log in daily at a single time with their classmates. Teachers can confirm students’ attendance and can confirm that students have access to internet resources and their computers. Although, this method doesn’t ensure that students will remain engaged in their studies throughout the school day.
Some video chat services also allow you to see the time when students entered the waiting room area. It will help you to evaluate students’ attendance even if you accidentally denied access.
Note Presence at the Beginning and End
If you require students to login in for the class and stay engaged in the classwork, take attendance at multiple-point-in-time. Note students’ attendance at the start of the class and at the end of the class. You can also take screenshots or can save attendance log multiple times during the class and can use it to evaluate attendance. It will also ensure that students are able to connect.
Otherwise, it might happen that students lose their connection during the class due to any reason without the teacher’s notice. Especially, in classes with a large number of students, teachers often find it difficult to track the presence of students. So, take attendance before or after the class or take screenshots multiple times.
Request Chat Interaction
Chat interaction can also be used to record students’ attendance. You can ask students to respond on a discussion board or in a chatbox. You can say it equivalent to passing paper in the classroom so everyone can sign their name. If you don’t want to count the heads in an online classroom, ask the students to confirm their attendance in a chatbox.
This method is effective to confirm that students are not only present but also engaged in the class. Teachers can save chat logs or can even take a printout of the log at the end of the class.
Running Log-in Reports
If your classes are designed in a way that students are not required to attend class at a certain time, it is difficult to record attendance at a single time. Running a report of log-in times can help you to record attendance in such cases.
Learning Management System can be used to run daily reports and it will show students who logged in during the day. You can mark those students’ attendance. This system will also help you to point out those students who have not logged in so, you can address the issues of those students and can ask them to join classes.
