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While Canvas does not offer by default the option for students to take their own attendance, we can set up a set of quizzes that can accomplish the same objective
Create your attendance quiz
1. Create a quiz
To begin navigate to the quiz tab in the canvas side menu, then click on the +Quiz/Survey button to start editing a new quiz
2. Configure Date and time
To set it up for the attendance scroll down until you see the assign access menu.
Once there make the quiz available during the times you want to allow students to register their own attendance, notice there are drop-down menus here with some preset times. If you want to have different times you can manually type the times by clicking on them. Once you have done that click on build which will take you to a new menu.
3. Making the Attendance question
Once in the build menu you need to click on add content button which has a "+" symbol on it then select multiple choice. Having that done it will allow us to create the options that we want our students to have. Maybe we just want them to either be present or absent, or we want to add things as late or early as options to your attendance quiz.
4. Configure grading
So, lets say you want to have the options present, late, and absent; and you want those different options to show something different in grading. So under the options menu you click on the "vary points by answer" option which will allow you to assign weights to the different attendance options you have created. as I have it setup here with 3 options: Present, Late, and did not show. Having vary points by answer selected you can weight these differently depending on how you much you consider it to be worth depending in your syllabus. In our example late is considered to be half present by being worth half the points.
5. Give it a password
Lastly, To ensure students must be in the classroom to take their own attendance, you can make up a password to show during class time. making it so only students present know how to complete the quiz. To do that you want to navigate to the settings menu which will open up a lot of different options click on the one that says "Require a student access code." One this is done a text box would appear, in there you can type any password you want and with that password your students will be able to access your quiz. Notice if you leave that text box empty there would be no password to enter the quiz. For attendance you will show this access code in class during the times the quiz is available to ensure that your students are present and have them manually go to the current days quiz to fill it out.
