Attendance: students marking themselves present

Attendance: students marking themselves present

by Ken Masters -
Number of replies: 5

Using 3.1

I teach most of my classes in a computer lab, and the students are logged into Moodle as a default as they enter.  I want to be able to use the attendance tool, but, as far as I understand, the attendance information is entered by the teacher, NOT by the students.  Is that correct?

I would really like a tool where the students can mark themselves present.  At the moment, I am using the Choice tool.  Some time in the lesson, I make it visible to them, they mark themselves present, and then I hide it.  

In earlier versions of Moodle (certainly in 1.X) it worked fine, but in 3.1 my students get many errors when trying to use the Choice tool, and they have to try sometimes up to ten times.

Is there the facility somewhere for students to mark themselves present/  Or any ideas on how to fake it using another tool.  (I even though thought of using the assignment tool, and getting them to upload a dummy file, but that seems overkill).

Thanks



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In reply to Ken Masters

Re: Attendance: students marking themselves present

by Ken Masters -

I've just seen in the Attendance tool that there is an option to allow students to record their own attendance, but it is not mentioned in the documentation sad

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In reply to Ken Masters

Re: Attendance: students marking themselves present

by Dan Marsden -
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Moodledocs are a wiki - feel free to help us improve them - I can't really keep on top of it all myself..

It does state in the description of the attendance plugin in the moodle.org plugins database that the ability for students to mark their own submission is possible too.

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In reply to Ken Masters

Re: Attendance: students marking themselves present

by Dan Marsden -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Plugins guardians Picture of Testers Picture of Translators

Hi Ken, 

The attendance module allows students to self-mark and has a number of different features that allow you to control this:

1) Password - allowing you to provide students a "password" which they must enter while submitting their attendance. (so you can display it in class for them to use)
2) Subnet restrictions - allowing you to restrict self-marking to a range of known computers (IP ranges).
3) Time-based attendance status - allowing you to provide different statuses to the students depending on how late they are.
4) Auto-mode - allowing you to just ask them to view the course homepage and it will use the restrictions you have set up (including subnet masks/time-based status etc.) - this mode also allows you to set up an attendance session after the class is over - it will look through the course logs and auto-mark attendance based on when they viewed the course homepage.

There are further improvements coming to self-marking but it's probably worth trying it out to see if it meets your needs - let us know how you go!

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In reply to Dan Marsden

Re: Attendance: students marking themselves present

by Ken Masters -

Hi Dan

Thanks for this - yes, sorry, my comment was more of an apology to the group for asking a dumb question, the answer to which I discovered a short while later when I explored the tool itself (and should have done in the first place), but I did not say it clearly.

I did not realise that it was a wiki - learning all the time.  Thanks.


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