Checking Attendance on Google Classroom

For the first week of online teaching, my school has been told to take attendance so that we can know which students do and which students do not have access to our online learning materials.

Taking attendance when you're the only one in the room feels super weird. 

One option was to host Zoom sessions and see who showed up, but I opted to make a Google Form instead.

I wanted to keep the Form as simple as possible, so it's only five questions long.

To ensure that students did not skip over the attendance form, I made it their first assignment for the week.

1. I numbered it #01 and labeled it as ATTENDANCE: 04/06 - 04/10 to make sure that students understood they only had to do this once to be counted for the week. 
2. I directly told the students that all they had to do to be marked "present" for the week was to answer the questions by 3PM on Tuesday. Unfortunately, that wasn't entirely apparent to some of them so next time I might make it even more clear. Some of them thought they had to answer the form multiple times.
3. I made the due date 3PM on Tuesday because that gave students two days to show me that they had signed in and looked at the week's assignments. 
4. Posting this as an assignment allowed me to see, at a glance, which students did/did not mark themselves present.

This is my attendance form. I made it extra (see my post with Google Form tips and tricks to learn how) with a Gatsby-inspired header image because we're currently covering the Great Gatsby in American Literature.

1. My first question is always "What's your name?"
2. I miss my students and wanted to know how they were feeling. Next week I might ask a slightly more involved question, but for this week I wanted to keep things as simple as humanly possible.
3. These last two questions showed me which students followed the assignments in order because the attendance check was posted after the weekly agenda (which I explained here). If a student answered that they did not know what their assignment was or when it was due, I emailed them to make sure they knew how to check their agenda.

And that's it! I don't have to worry about grading this because it's just a check-in. Using this form enabled me to quickly find out which students were/were not accessing Google Classroom. 

If you would like to use a generic version of this form (you're going to have to manually edit the question that specifically says "American Lit" and the title of the form itself), I've made one that you can open and make a copy of. 

HCBE Employees: Make a copy by clicking here

Everyone else: Make a copy by clicking here

Once you make a copy (and edit the spot that says [edit to insert class's name]), you can post this to your class like any other Google Form. 

Hope this helps!

Until next time,

K. Hanlin