Attendance (Roll Call) Tool in Canvas: How does it work?

Roll Call (Attendance Tool) is an embedded tool in Canvas for keeping ongoing attendance records.

Attendance Roll Call is triggered the first time you take actual roll in Canvas.
- After the first Roll Call an assignment will automatically appear on the "Assignments" tab, with a default value of 100 points. This may need to be dragged to the proper group category and reset
The students are populated automatically to match the People tab.
You have the option to work from a seating chart or create award badges for participation in face-to-face class meetings.
*The tool tends to be more valuable for instructors than it is for students--students can only see their attendance grade and not the details of their attendance record.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

Cons:

Solutions:

Many instructors use a clip-board sign in sheet each day or week, so that late coming students don't interrupt class. This also allows the teacher to enter information at their own convenience.
Alternately, teachers may choose to take attendance old-styleon paper and transfer only the final number into a single assignment placeholder in the gradebook column. If a teacher elects to keep roll on paper and only transfer the final grade at the end of semester, the Canvas "Attendance" navigation tab should be hidden in Settings to avoid confusion.

Enable the Attendance tab in course navigation to be visible in the list.
- Settings-->Navigation-->drag "Attendance" tab to upper half of list view--> save.
The Attendance Tool is triggered the first time you take attendance in class.
- The first time you take roll, the tool automatically creates a 100-point assignment for attendance.
- Be sure to view the "Assignments" tab and place this generated assignment placeholder to the proper group. (It does well in a group by itself, weighted to whatever % you want attendance to count for the course, regardless of point value, ie, if Attendance if 10% of grade, weight this category for 10%.)
  - You can adjust the point value of the assignment and move the assignment into a different assignment group. Other than this, you shouldn’t make any changes to the assignment.

Be prepared for this grade to wander up and down a lot during the course of a semester!
- On day two of a class, if a student was absent one day and present one day, the student will have a 50% for attendance.
- On day ten of the same class, if the student doesn’t miss any more days, the student will have a 90 for attendance (one day absent, nine present)
- On day 11 of the same class, if you forget to take attendance, the student will still have a 90.
Tardies are expressed as a percentage of an absence. By default, a tardy is worth 80% of an absence.
- You can change this tardy value from within the tool.

You can view students in a list form, or create a seating chart view.
If you click on a student name from within the tool, you can see tardies and absences.
You can choose to create and award badges for student participation within the class.
- Badges do not impact student attendance grades. You can view a student’s collected badges by clicking on the student name from within the tool.
You can export student attendance records as a .csv file. Each day’s entry for each student is listed as a separate line.

Students see only their grade for the Roll Call assignment. There is no indicator of which days were missed or tardy. The badges are not visible to students.
Unless you mute the assignment in the gradebook, students will receive a grade change notification from Canvas every time you take roll.
- If the assignment is muted, students will not be able to view their attendance grade.
*Remember to "un-mute" this assignment at the end of semester!