I thought a little more about your question, and I do have "Attendance" in all of my face-to-face courses in my Moodle grade book.
I tend to use Excel at the beginning of class to keep track of who showed up. Then I enter this into my grade book using the "Single View" mode feature within the Moodle grade book. I guess that if I wanted to, I could open this single view page in my classroom, and just enter the grades. I really have not thought about doing this, but maybe I will with my next course. There are two ways to do this: 1) give everyone their points, then change grades for those not attending, or 2) give 0's for those not attending, then do a bulk edit (i.e., give points) for those who are attending. I am not sure which would work better. But you have me thinking.
In my grade book, I have a grade category called "Attendance", and I then give it a certain weight towards the final grade. Usually, I don't give much more than 10-20 percent for attendance, but you might want to weight it more heavily. I cannot think of a situation for myself where lack of attending one meeting would produce a final grade of zero. But if a student doesn't attend much, their grade can drop one letter.
In one of my courses, I use "clickers." When I do this, it is easy to import attendance right into a grade item in Moodle. I import both a grade for attendance, and a grade for "clicker questions."
As I think more about your question, one might create a forum with one question, such as "What number am I displaying on the white board." Open this only while in class and let students respond to this question. Those who get it correct will get attendance points. Then built your desired weighting for this forum question into the grade book.
