Tracking Attendance in Canvas

Need to track attendance? Tired of shuffling paper attendance sheets around? Canvas has a Roll Call Attendance application and a Qwickly Attendance application you can use to track attendance.

This article covers:

• Overview of Qwickly
• Overview of Roll Call Attendance
• Feature Comparison
• Creating reports from Roll Call Attendance
• Tracking attendance outside of Canvas

Qwickly Attendance

Qwickly is an external tool for students self-check in and attendance tracking. It lets students use their mobile devices, the Canvas Student App and traditional attendance tracking by the instructor. Qwickly includes easy-to-view attendance reports for both instructors and students. Instructors can choose whether to grade attendance and, if grading, how many points they want to award for attendance. Setup and usage Instructions are available in ourQwickly Supportarticle.

Roll Call Attendance

Roll Call Attendance is an external tool that allows faculty tomark students as Present, Absent or Late. You can view students alphabetically or use a seating chart.Instructions for setting up and using Roll Call Attendance are available in the Canvas Community.

Comparing Qwickly Attendance with Roll Call Attendance

Qwicky and Roll Call Feature Comparison

Feature	Qwickly	Roll Call
Student Self-Check-In	Yes	No
Optional Gradebook Column	Yes	No
Ability to set number of points for Gradebook	Yes	No
Easy on-screen Attendance Report	Yes	No
View Sections separately or together	Yes	No
Sort Students alphabetically	Yes	Yes
Seating Chart	No	Yes

Creatingan Attendance Report Using Roll Call Attendance

Roll Call Attendance offers a basic attendance report for download. To view detailed absences, late and attended entries check each student's attendance record in the Roll Call Attendance tool. For a detailed report of all the students, follow these instructions to create an Excel sheet with attendance data.

Tracking Attendance Outside of Canvas

If you don't want to use the Roll Call Attendance tool in Canvas, you can use Canvas to download a spreadsheet with a list of all your students' names. To download the spreadsheet:

1. Go to"Grades"in your course.
2. Click"Actions" in the upper left corner of your gradebook.Select"Export."
3. This will create a file in CSV (comma delimited) formatthat you can open in Excel.
4. When you open the file in Excel you will be prompted to pick a delimiter.For this file select "Comma."
5. Names will be listed in column A.You can delete allthe other columns and addcolumns for daily attendance.When you're done setting up your attendance sheet, clickthe"File"menu and choose"Save As."Save the file in"Excel Workbook" format (.xlsx).

For more information on using Canvas, please visit theCanvas Communityfor comprehensive resources beyond St. Edward's.