Every day I add a question to Google Classroom asking students to indicate their attendance.
Create Question
Google Classroom is designed to be organized on the Classwork tab. Click on “Classwork” at the top and use the “Create” button to choose “Question.”
Choose Multiple Choice
The default when you ask a question in Google Classroom is a “Short answer” response. Click on the tiny arrow next to “Short answer” to switch to Multiple Choice.
“What are we doing today?”
In the Instructions include any important announcements or messages. I create a single Google Slides which I add to the question each day. Same Google Slides. I add a new slide at the top each day with what we are doing that day. The reason for this is the Slides can be updated easily and embedded on my class website, AND added to the attendance question, AND easily emailed to anyone who is not in my class who wants to know what the assignments are. Only one thing to update.
However, even though I have my slides I still include those things I want students to pay attention to or remember in the description of the attendance question.
Schedule It
Sometimes I can not sleep and I’m up at 2am doing my lesson plans for the day. At least one of my students always notices and wants to know what I was doing up at 2am. Posting the attendance question pushes an alert to student phones and sends them an email. I try to schedule the attendance question for 10 minutes before school starts.
Click on the tiny arrow next to the “Ask” to schedule the time you want your attendance question to go out. Note that you can NOT schedule a post to more than one class at a time. After scheduling your attendance question go to each period you teach and “Reuse Post” to grab the scheduled attendance question from 1st period and schedule it for a different time.
Reuse Post
I ask the same question every day for attendance. So instead of retyping the multiple choice options I use “Reuse post” on the Classwork page.
