Hi
We are looking for suggestions from everyone to grade the attendance in moodle and how it should be handled so that we can incorporate that in the next release.
Regards,
Somaroy Gabbita
Human Logic FZ LLC
Are you looking for technical way to do so efficiently, or are you looking for teachers and the like to say what interface or options would be useful?
As a teacher I can just say I would like to either be able to set point values for each denotation (present, tardy, absent, excused) and then that could be added together and entered under something called attendance in the gradebook. The other nice way for teacher controlling point total clodely would be to have to option to base it on the student's attendance percentage and they get that much of how ever many points I say attendance is worth. So if I say attendance is 50 points and you have an 80% attendance rate you get a 40 in the gradebook. Either way would be grand even if not both.
Hope that's what you wanted.
As a teacher I can just say I would like to either be able to set point values for each denotation (present, tardy, absent, excused) and then that could be added together and entered under something called attendance in the gradebook. The other nice way for teacher controlling point total clodely would be to have to option to base it on the student's attendance percentage and they get that much of how ever many points I say attendance is worth. So if I say attendance is 50 points and you have an 80% attendance rate you get a 40 in the gradebook. Either way would be grand even if not both.
Hope that's what you wanted.
Looks like this forum has been quiet for a while now. I like the ideas that Adam has proposed here and just wanted to add one suggestion/request. I usually grade attendance with a 'participation' factor included. What I mean here is that I give students a number (between 0 and 3) which gives me some baseline quantitative data linked to their attendance and participation. The 0 is for an absence, a 1 for a tardy or sleeping in class (happens all too often at the university where I am currently teaching), a 2 for being on time and alert in class, and finally a 3 for above average participation in class plus being on time and alert. If the attendance feature would allow me to use these numbers and then calculate attendance based on a 'total possible' that I am able to enter manually, that would be additionally grand 
Also, it would be really nice if the total number of 0's could be calculated for me but that may be asking for too much...? I do all of this now in Excel but it would be nice to have it all on line where students could check their 'status' as the semester progresses.
Just some ideas.
Jason
Just some ideas.
Jason
Yes to Adam's and Jason's comments! My current non-moodle system uses 15 different marks, all with different point values that are calculated into a student's total grade: A (absent, 0 points), AE (absent excused, 4 points), SR (school related absence excused, 4 points) and so forth... I don't wish to bore you!
The addsession.php page is good: it allows you to customize the acronym, description, and percentage. All I need is to be able to specify the number of different marks. Right now, the number of marks is fixed at 4. I believe this tweak would also meet Jason's needs, and most other teachers. Then I would just convert my point system to the existing percentage system - no big deal.
As a brute force hack, I did go into the moodle database, 'mdl_attendance_settings' table and insert rows for all the extra marks I wished to use. Vola! They magically appeared in addsession.php.
However, they did NOT appear in report.php nor takeattendance.php pages, which are big problems! Also, the inserting needs to be repeated with every class which is laborous. 
I have been reviewing the php pages in question. Unfortunately, I don't know php which makes me always dangerous, never productive. Is anyone else messing around with this?? I want this fix, and I want it bad enough to hurt myself (late nights beating my head). Attendence is the only piece of my classroom grading that I haven't migrated to Moodle yet.
The addsession.php page is good: it allows you to customize the acronym, description, and percentage. All I need is to be able to specify the number of different marks. Right now, the number of marks is fixed at 4. I believe this tweak would also meet Jason's needs, and most other teachers. Then I would just convert my point system to the existing percentage system - no big deal.
As a brute force hack, I did go into the moodle database, 'mdl_attendance_settings' table and insert rows for all the extra marks I wished to use. Vola! They magically appeared in addsession.php.
I have been reviewing the php pages in question. Unfortunately, I don't know php which makes me always dangerous, never productive. Is anyone else messing around with this?? I want this fix, and I want it bad enough to hurt myself (late nights beating my head). Attendence is the only piece of my classroom grading that I haven't migrated to Moodle yet.