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Recently announced change coming to Attendance

Corrine Duncan

In the weekly “What's New” there is a notice about an upcoming workflow change to recording attendance. Excerpt below:

Towards the end of April, we will be making an update to the Record attendance modal. The experience will remain the same with one key workflow change as Present will not be selected by default for all students. Instead, Faculty will now have the choice to either manually select Present or if they leave an attendance field blank for a student upon saving, the system will insert a Present attendance code automatically. An in-system notification displays on the modal to act as a reminder of this change.

With this update, we’re introducing a couple of small enhancements as well. The names of students that appear in the modal will now follow Username format and teachers will be able to easily swap to a view of their seating chart to take attendance.

image shows the record attendance screen

Based on my understanding, the default "Present" setting is no longer available. Instead, teachers will leave any present students unmarked, which might seem counterintuitive, and only fill in absences. There's a small note at the bottom indicating that anything left blank will be submitted as "Present," but it appears quite inconspicuous and easy to overlook.

Although the timing of this release is not ideal, is anyone concerned about this becoming an additional stressor for our teachers? Alternatively, does anyone have a plan in place to assist teachers in adjusting ahead of time?

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Comments

Jo Giesecke

@Corrine Duncan It does state “…if they leave an attendance field blank for a student upon saving, the system will insert a Present attendance code automatically.”

Cecilia Kwilos

@Corrine Duncan
It is not ideal for us for the faculty attendance function to change during a school year, and my attendance manager is wondering if it can be confirmed in advance that her pre-populated absence codes will be visible for the teachers when taking class attendance. We will be alerting teachers to be aware of the coming change, as well as any related policy changes as faculty members take attendance.

Stacey Jansen

@Cecilia Kwilos

I agree--changing this during a school year is terrible.

Megan Day

I may be in the minority on this but I'd prefer these smaller updates happen throughout the school year so they don't all pile up over the summer and then there is a laundry list of updates to catch teachers up on in the fall. With that being said, I wish Blackbaud would put out more short video clips of the updates “in action” BEFORE the update is launched. Since I see the updates at the same time as the rest of the faculty, I make a video the morning the change happens before the rest of the faculty get to campus. I definitely agree that not showing “Present” by default will be counter intuitive for teachers. I'm curious to know the reasoning behind the change.

To @Corrine Duncan's question about preparing teachers, my plan is to send out an email today with the screenshot and explanation provided from Blackbaud. I'll follow it up with a brief announcement at our faculty meeting this week so I can answer any questions that come up and will send out at least one more reminder in the next week or two (since the update is coming, “towards the end of April”). Then, I'll check for the update every morning and once it's launched, I'll make my short video, edit, and send it out to teachers. THEN, I'll have to update all our “how-to” documentation on taking attendance so it's ready for new teachers in the fall. What a process… ?

Bryna Gleich

If I were to hazard a guess (a guess since it's not my area), I'd guess that they have some evidence that the change will hopefully reduce cognitive load on users maybe.

Why? By removing the extra text for “present” as the default, maybe it'll make the “absent/tardy" ones seem to quickly “jump out" when the teacher scans the page, instead of having to read past “present, present, present… ” over and over again. Personally, when I see the same thing over and over I sometimes become accidentally “blind" to errors or subtle changes.

So by making them blank, but blank also meaning “present” it might help that sort of situation, without adding any extra clicks for the users to complete the action of taking attendance.