Using the Attendance Tool in Canvas for Contact Tracing

This document will instruct users on setting up the Attendance tool and creating a seating chart for contact tracing.

First, you'll need to enable the Attendance tool on your navigation bar in Canvas. To do this, you'll go to the Settings tab and click on Navigation at the top of the page. Then, you'll need to drag the Attendance tool from the disabled menu to the top, active menu: 


You can adjust your navigation bar under the Settings > Navigation page in Canvas.


Once you've clicked Save at the bottom of the page to confirm your changes, you'll see Attendance now available on the navigation bar. When you click on the Attendance tool for the first time, you'll see a list of students within your course. Click on the Edit Seating Chart button at the top right of the tool to begin creating your seating chart: 


The Attendance tool in the Canvas navbar will provide you with a list of your students that you can use to create a seating chart.



You'll need to drag and drop students from your class list into the available spaces within the Attendance tool. It should look something like this when you're done:


The primary pages in Roll Call Attendance are for editing your seating chart and physically taking attendance.



At any point, you can rearrange students or remove them from your active seating chart by dragging them back to the class list. To actually begin taking attendance, you'll need to click on the Take Attendance button to the left of the Edit Seating Chart option. To take attendance, you'll simply click directly on your students. A green check mark means the student was present in class that day, whereas a red x will mean that student was absent: 


Clicking on students will change their profiles to green if they're present that day or red if they were absent that day.


You'll see the class date is also available at the top right of the page. Every day, the seating chart will refresh and you'll be able to take attendance again for that specific day:


The Roll Call tool allows you to take attendance every day right from Canvas. Clicking on any date will bring you back to that specific day's attendance.




Note: Taking Attendance in Canvas will create an Assignment titled Roll Call Attendance worth 100 points. This is a default setting. To change the point value or make attendance ungraded, all you'll need to do is Edit the assignment and chose "Not Graded" from the "Display Grade as" category:

Editing the existing Role Call Attendance assignment will change the point value that's auto-created.

Select "Not Graded" from the "Display Grade as" option in an assignment to make the assignment ungraded in Canvas.



Keywords:
contact tracing, attendance, Canvas, roll call 
Doc ID:
113578
Owned by:
Maggie L. in UW Parkside
Created:
2021-09-09
Updated:
2021-09-09
Sites:
UW Parkside