Spotlight on Attendance help topics and tutorials

Paul Bowers

As students returned for the fall term, we started hearing questions from the Education Management community about setting up, recording, and modifying attendance. We thought it might be helpful to put all of our help topics and tutorials on attendance in one place.Here are some attendance guides and help topics that we hope will be useful for everyone from newcomers to veteran users. If you have any other questions about attendance, sound off in the comments and we’ll get to work updating the help to better answer them!

How to set up attendance at your school

The Attendance Setup Guide will walk you through the steps of setting up attendance categories, setting record methods, and enabling attendance. It also walks you through the steps to create virtual attendance categories (see the Set record method heading).

Focused help topics on attendance

The Attendance landing page is where you can find all of our help topics on attendance, including how to generate a course roster report, how to set up and use seating charts, and how to modify attendance after it has been recorded.
As a reminder, you can always look for help using the search bar in the Help Center.

Help for faculty

The Faculty Resources landing page includes help topics specific to the Faculty persona. Two important topics for Attendance include:

• Seating Charts: How to create them, how to edit them, and how to use them to take attendance.
• Course Roster Report: How to generate a list of students enrolled in a course.

Setting infractions and consequences for attendance

Conduct managers can create attendance rules so that when students receive a certain number of tardies or absences, they receive infractions and consequences. For information on setting up this feature, see the help topic Attendance Rules for Conduct.

Adding a virtual attendance category

The Attendance Categories help topic includes instructions for setting up virtual attendance-taking at your school.
For a walkthrough with screen shots, see our blog post from September 2020, Introducing: Virtual attendance types!

Setting up seating charts

Last fall, we introduced the ability to take attendance through seating charts. This was a highly requested feature in the community, so we published a walkthrough with screenshots when the feature went live. You can read that here: Introducing Seating Charts for Attendance. You can also check out the help topic Seating Charts.
Let us know if you’re hitting any stumbling blocks and can’t find the help you’re looking for. We’re always looking to improve!

Stephen Pilon

As I have mentioned in the Ideas forum and elsewhere, the Higher-Ed attendance functions need to be updated to match how Higher-Ed works, rather than how K-12 works. Most importantly, faculty need to be able to modify their own attendance logs, or at the least, the Attendance Manager needs to be able to turn on/off an option for faculty self-editing. I understand the need for control over K-12 attendance, but faculty at this level use attendance for very different reasons, and while following some guidelines from the college bulletin, often have additional consequences for tardiness/absence.