Attendance Update Implementation Date

Justine Levesque

I have been looking for a date when they will be releasing the new attendance update but nothing more has come out. The first release said end of April and well we are at the end of April now.

Does anyone have any more information? I asked support and they did not have a date.

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.

Kathy Hannon

@Justine Levesque the last I saw was that Blackbaud would be rolling in waves starting I think 4/30

Michael Clark

@Justine Levesque
I hadn't heard about an attendance update. Thank you for the heads up! Would you possibly have a link to where it was announced? I'd be interested to find out more.

Michael Clark

@Michael Clark
I was able to find a minute-long youtube video, but would still be interested to learn more.

In the video, they say that all students will automatically be marked as Present, until changed (is my understanding). Can we opt out of this feature? It seems this could be very problematic for a multitude of reasons.

Justine Levesque

Hi @Michael Clark, I also indirectly heard about it in the Blackbaud Community. But it's included in their What's Recent section of the K-12 Blog under Academics.

Derek Nichols

@Kathy Hannon Yup, that's correct! The plan is to roll this out in waves starting on April 30 and through the next few weeks into May.

Corrine Duncan

@Derek Nichols will any PMAs (Premeditated Absences) entered in the system show through on the class attendance screen?

Michael Morrissette

Hi @Michael Clark -

I think I should clarify this point slightly.

The behavior that you see in the video and what exists in today's experience are congruent. The ‘present’ designation doesn't apply to the student until the teacher clicks ‘Save’. Very much like today, once the attendance modal is opened and saved, that present value is assigned. The difference with this change is that instead of the dropdown displaying ‘present’ by default, it'll display null. This gives the teacher two choices, either they can opt to leave the dropdown blank, in which case present will be assigned upon saving the modal, or the teacher can manually mark students with the present attendance code. Regardless of the path the teacher chooses, the outcome is the same, the student is marked present unless a non-present attendance code is selected.

Happy to discuss further if you would like. Feel free to reach out at michael.morrissette@blackbaud.com

For the others, here's a link to the video that was referenced for easy viewing on the changes coming to attendance modal: Blackbaud Education Management - Record Attendance Updates (youtube.com)

-Mike

Michael Morrissette

Hi @Corrine Duncan -

Yes, those attendance codes will still appear for faculty just like they do today.

This update is really just taking the existing experience and moving it to SKY UX. All of the functionality is largely staying the same with the exception of now being able to choose to leave the dropdown null to assign present, or to award present manually. Otherwise, the student names will now respect the User Name Format setting found in Core. Outside of that, the experience is staying the same.

-Mike

Michael Morrissette

Hello Everyone -

I know everyone is very interested in when this feature will be releasing and I wanted to just provide a quick update on our rollout timeframe.

In our last round of QA, we found a defect that we want to clean up before release. Because of this, we will delaying the rollout by one week to give us the needed time to implement the fix and QA the feature again to ensure a smooth release. The new timeframe will be communicated in next week's What's New, but I wanted to give you all a quick update before the What's New is published. Schools will not begin to see the attendance update until 05/07, with a new wave of schools being enabled on a weekly basis until 05/21.

I apologize for the delay. We want to make sure anything new we release works as optimally as possible, so I hope you understand our decision to delay.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me at michael.morrissette@blackbaud.com

-Mike