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Hi, my name is Victoria Shropshire and I teach in the English department here at Elon
I teach writing and literature courses, and I'm going to talk to you now about using
The "Attendance" feature in Moodle
In my english 110 course
I have turned the "Attendance" setting on, which you do through you "Edit
Settings" function
And it will always load it into this permanent topics block that can't
Be relocated
But you can actually move it up and down and you can make it visible or not
Visible to students. I like to leave it visible so that they can see,
for instance, how many attendances, or how many absences they've racked
up. For instance, in my course
I have a maximum three that are allowed
And I don't really distinguish between excused or not excuse
If they are not Athletes. Athletes are the only ones who I'll
Accept an excused absence for, and those usually come from the coaches
In other words, I really don't care
Why they're not in class, they're just allowed to not be there for three times
And then after that we have words
Now I don't actually use attendance as a part of the assessment rubric for
Grading the course
But if you do, the "Attendance" function can be very easily tethered to
Your grade book as well, so that Moodle does that for you
If you click on "Attendance,"
And I've done this in class; I do this in the first five minutes of class, on days
That I do take attendance, because I don't do it every day
But when i do,
I will click on that days. So for instance, here we'll click on "February
eighth," which is a Wednesday
And it's a regular class section
The roster will come up alphabetically
And it will have different toggle points that you can choose from
Present
Is "P." "L" is late
"E" is excused, and "A" is absent
If they are "E" for excused
I will often, in the remarks box right here,
Write something like "Softball Tournament"
And that way I know that I have some sort of documentation; either a letter,
A memo, an email, what have you, from a coach that says they're traveling
And therefore, excused from class
And then when you're done taking attendance, at the very bottom you hit
"Save attendance"
And it will automatically store whatever you've marked for the day
If you want to see a view of all of the days that you've marked
You click on the "report" tab at the top
And this looks similar to the grade book view
And then it lists your students alphabetically, top to bottom
And then left to right
It lists "assignments", in this case "days" chronologically
So you can see, for instance,
When they were present, when they were excused
etc., etc.,
If you scroll all the way to the end of the semester at any given point
It also gives you
Cumulative columns at the end it will tell you how many days they were
Present, late, excused, absent
And then again it will formulate a grade
This grade column will appear in the "reports" view regardless of whether or
Not you've tethered it to your grade book
If you want it to be calculated, for instance, if it's ten percent of their
Grade, for instance,
This student was present nineteen out of twenty-four meetings, and whatever that
Translates to in the form of an empirical number, or grade
Will appear as long as you've chosen a category in the grade book for it to
Appear in. Otherwise, keep it uncategorized and it's simply a tool
That you can see and students can see as well
To keep track of how many times they've attended class