Attendance

When a new semester begins, I usually struggle with two things: learning students’ names and keeping attendance. Students drop and add classes, and it’s hard to take attendance without knowing who is who. Students being late and myself getting back into teaching mode make matters worse.

Well, there’s an app for that. This January the semester beginning has been different due to a most useful tool called, quite appropriately, Attendance.

Getting set up was fairly easy: I downloaded a CSV template to my computer, pasted my students’ info into the file, put it into a designated dropbox folder, and imported the data in my iPhone (it’ll also work in iPhone touches and iPads).

I added pictures, and now I fire up the app every time I enter the classroom. I hit “present” for those students who are already there and then those as they are coming in. Actively putting a face to the name made name memorization much faster this semester, I know pretty much all names already (something that could otherwise take weeks – generally until the first exam).

The app generates reports, and thus quickly helped me find those “ghost students” who started dropping the course during the first few weeks without letting me know. I can also send quick e-mails to those missing, something I might try if attendance becomes a problem.

The “random” function is a great bonus. It picks students who are present at random, and also pairs up students in groups of 2, 3, 4, etc.

The app was $4.99, and so far the most useful teaching productivity tool. Now if it would only integrate seamlessly with moodle…

Link to the app