Teacher Tech blog with Alice Keeler

Paperless Is Not a Pedagogy

Alice Keeler

Google Forms: Attendance for Remote Learning

Sort Attendance From a Google Form
Google Forms: Attendance for Remote Learning

How do you take attendance for remote learning? Lots of ways. One way for Google Classroom is to use the ask a question feature. I can easily from Classroom see a count of how many have submitted. But Google Forms is probably a better choice so you can use the same Form everyday and have continuous data.

YouTube video

Same Google Form

So the joy and pain of using the same Form is that all the attendance is in the same place. But what if you want to know who checked in on Wednesday?

toTabs Add-on

toTabs is an Add-on for Google Sheets that takes your information from one column and makes a tab for each unique entry. You want this. Trust me.

I personally coded this! Get your IT person to do a domain install 🙂

Using a Google Form for Attendance

USE MULTIPLE CHOICE!! Here is my general rule of thumb when making a Google Form, for as many questions as humanly possible do NOT let the person type something in. If they type it in it becomes UGLY to sort and filter by that information. If it is not an open comment box, I highly recommend you figure out how to make it multiple choice.

You can NOT sort by what is a free response answer. So if you want to filter for it, make it multiple choice.

One Option Multiple Choice

Add a question to your Google Form that has ONE multiple choice option. Click here to make a copy of my sample. The one choice is today’s date. Every day, change the date on the Form. Same question, same multiple choice, just edit the multiple choice words.

YouTube video

Spreadsheet

On the Responses tab, click the spreadsheet icon to view your attendance information in a spreadsheet. After having installed the toTabs Add-on, click on the Add-on menu and choose toTabs and “Show Sidebar.” From the sidebar use the drop down menu to select the column you want to sort by.

Note: Do NOT choose Timestamp, they are not unique fields since it records the second a student checked in.

Daily Reset

The code only runs when you click the submit button, which means tomorrow’s tab will not be created when you run it today. Each time you go to the spreadsheet click the “Reset” button in the sidebar. Refresh the spreadsheet and now run toTabs again.

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