Taking Class Attendance on Teams for Education
Published Jun 18 2020 08:00 AM 92.1K Views
Microsoft

School closures during COVID-19 led to a movement from classroom to online education, utilizing Microsoft Teams for Education as a platform to manage school learning activities. In this situation, teachers needed the capability to take attendance within Teams.


The Attendance app on Teams for Education allows teachers to take student attendance and generate simple attendance reports to answer frequent class attendance related questions. This app resides within the Teams environment, allowing teachers to manage attendance without needing to move to another tool.


Built using Power Apps within Teams, the attendance reports are generated using Power Automate. Raw data for attendance is available on SharePoint lists and can be easily surfaced by reporting and data visualization tools such as Power BI.


This simple-to-use app is available on GitHub and can be extended/customized to meet a school’s changing needs.


The key features of the app are:

  1. Teachers can take and save the attendance of students.
  2. The list of students in a class is auto populated from Office 365 groups.
  3. Teachers can edit attendance for up to 30 days into the past.
  4. Teachers can generate class attendance reports and obtain the percentage of classes that a student has or has not attended.
  5. Teachers can generate student specific attendance reports to get the dates that a student was present or absent for a class.

Take Attendance tab allows teachers to take student attendance.

1.png

 

This screen comprises of three sections:

  • Input fields: where the teacher selects a class, enters the start and end times, and initiates a class by loading the list of students (automatically pulled through Office 365 groups).
  • Summarized metrics: shows the high-level metrics of the class for ready reference, such as total number of students, number of students present, absent, etc.
  • Student list: where the teacher marks attendance.

The Historic Attendance tab allows teachers to generate simple attendance reports for a class of student for a desired date range. This helps answer simple questions such as the number of classes or percentage of classes attended by a student, the list of dates that a student was absent for a specific class, etc.

2.png

 

This screen comprises of three sections:

  • Input fields: where the teacher selects the class and the desired date range for the report.
  • Summarized metrics: shows the high-level metrics of the class for ready reference, such as total classes held.
  • Report: provides the number of classes where the student was present, absent, late, excused, and the percentage of classes attended by the student, and are exported to OneDrive.

The steps to install this app are as follows. Detailed step-by-step instructions with screenshots are also available on GitHub.

  1. Create a team with staff members and make this group a security enabled group to enable sharing the app to any member added to the staff team.
  2. Create a SharePoint list, which has been automated using Power Automate.
  3. Install Attendance Power Apps and Power Automate zip, and create SharePoint, Office 365 and OneDrive connections.
  4. Add Power App to Teams and get started.

The Attendance app uses the following connectors:

  • SharePoint to save and read data from a SharePoint list.
  • Power Automate to process student records from the SharePoint list and export the CSV file to OneDrive.
  • Office 365 Groups to read group member list.
  • Office 365 Users to read user profile information.
  • OneDrive to place export file information.
12 Comments
Copper Contributor

If this uses Staff teams, then it's fundamentally flawed - as we'd want to do this for a Class team, not staff. Hopefully this is a sign that MS recognises that adding the take attendance feature is lacking currently and will be integrated soon. 

Thanks for sharing, but won't be using this in our org

Copper Contributor

It lists all Groups with a Team that you as the creator are an owner in, I changed my membership from owner to member in all but Class Teams and now it just shows classes. Its a start but would be great as @ElliotAtSurrey  said if this were integrated.

Thanks for sharing

Copper Contributor

This is so hard to figure out.  Why isn't it easier to take attendance in teams? I am wasting time trying to install all of this.

Copper Contributor

Taking attendance is really difficult..installing and going through many process using power builder power apps is very lengthy and difficult..hope Microsoft comes out with a easier solution

Copper Contributor

Wow! Microsoft really expects people to go thru all this steps to have attendance possibilities in Teams??? This again reminds me why I'm a Mac user. A simple ability to see who connected to my last meeting would be a start. Instead, I have to sign up to something I never heard of and have no clue what all that GitHub is about. I'm using computers for 30 years know and usually find my way around installing software/drivers/extensions which doesn't follow common installation procedures, but here, Microsoft, you raised the level of nonsense to a completely new universum!

Brass Contributor

As pointed out by the comments above - I am not sure why Microsoft has some apps available from the apps button in the bottom left (or in the + menu when adding an app) and sometimes has some useful apps that it directs customers to install themselves from GitHub. For a lot of customers, they will not have the resources or the will to install these - can. they not just be added to the app library by Microsoft. There are a lot of examples, but taking attendance in Teams for education seems like a no brainer to include in core functionality for a teacher to just add as a tab themselves.

Copper Contributor

I think you all misunderstand how this works. You want a staff team to be able to use the attendance app. Say you have a team for teachers, everybody in that team will have the rights to actually use the attendance app. Students will not be able to use it. Once the teachers have the rights then you can implement the application in student teams for teachers to use.

 

Also I believe this is not something teachers should have to do but the IT guy (systems admin) that actually sets everything up so you as a teacher can simply click the tab and add the application.

 

I am the systems admin at our school and I'm looking to implement this to see how it works compared to the current outsourced system we have for attendance. If it works it could save a lot of money.

Copper Contributor

So After about 2 hours I think I got it to work. It does take a lot of effort and the end result is not as slick as you would like. But it does do what it promises. For me however it's not yet the right fit. The main reason being that the current system we have (a Dutch made product you can find on www.aattendance.nl) does a much better job at bringing it all together.

 

My findings:

Pro's: 

- Free when your school has the Microsoft office for education version with unlimited free licenses for students and teachers)

- Simple and easy to understand layout

- Integrates in Teams when and where you want it

- Once set-up it's easy for teachers to add it to their Team

 

Con's:

- You have to select the Team you want to take attendance from. Even if the app is inside the Team itself (no link there)

- You have to set the start time and finish time

- You have to initiate the attendance taking after setting up above information before you see any students

- Team owners (like Teachers, assistant teachers, admins and all other non student accounts linked to the team) also show up on the attendance sheet

- The design makes it so that the top half of the page is taken up by information that can easily fit in one small row leaving only the bottom half for the actual overview of the attendees.

 

All in all I would say it has potential and I'm sure that with further development it can become more slick and easy to use. For now I would say either let the Microsoft Teams development team take a shot at it or let the community continue work on it. The beauty of this application is that it was made with PowerApps and from what I can see you can change the layout as you see fit if you have the know how. My guess would be that even the automatic detection of teams combined with Team agenda's could create a beautifull end result. 

 

But allas for now we are sticking with our outsourced (paid) system and simply use the add website option in Teams to integrate it all into Teams. That way students don't have to leave Teams and can see their attendance record and teachers can register with the same ease as they would with this application.

 

PS. To the developers of this app, my hat goes of to you. I would not be able to create this myself but would be very happy to give practical feedback and compare the system we use now to what you have created here. Just because I won't be using the app does not mean I don't see the potential and passion that has gone into making it.

Copper Contributor

hi 

i did try but it is quit diffcult 

i need help 

 

Copper Contributor

Microsoft, please come up with a better solution. An attendance feature would be a huge help to educators.
It's a win for you, too. There is good money in education. All you need to do is make a product teachers can use. You are halfway there. 

Copper Contributor

Hi everybody,

 

I have found a company in Denmark called Attender that has made my wish come true when it comes to this subject. I now have a beautifully integrated attendance feature that works completely within the Microsoft Office 365 environment. It is as far as I can find the only company that is worth investing in as a school. There is a one time set up and they helped a lot and after that it's easy click and go for all teachers. Even students if you want. I recommend every school big but also specifically small (concidering the attractive pricepoint they offer) to look into this add-on for Microsoft Teams.

 

Attender - Fast attendance registration for web, app and Microsoft Teams

 

They have my vote. Also directed at Microsoft, pay attention to this company and see how you can help them reach more educational institutions because boy is it a big void right now where there should obviously be a system like this in place if you label your product for education.

 

Hope it helps somebody,

Kind regards,

Nick

Copper Contributor

Hi - is there any easier way of using class teams to take the class attendance register? 

Version history
Last update:
‎Jan 26 2021 12:04 PM
Updated by: