Streamline Student Attendance with Google Forms: A Step-by-Step Guide (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Whether you're a school or individual teacher using Zoom, Meet or Learncube's standalone virtual classroom, you'll need an effective way to track student attendance. Teachers are often running from one class to the next, so it's important that this process is quick and as easy as possible. In this video, I'll show you a simple setup using a free Google Form, which will allow you to streamline your class records. First, we'll need to create a new Google Form and add some simple questions. As you type the questions, Google will automatically suggest the response type, and it's usually pretty accurate. Here you can see I'm asking for the teacher's name, class date and time, student name and comments. We want these questions to be compulsory, so let's click on each one and toggle this little required button. Now I want to add another important question so the teacher can mark the student's attendance easily. I'll add a radio button option so the teacher can mark whether the student was late, on time or a no-show. Now, you can make this form as simple or as complicated as you like. I recommend erring on the side of simplicity. If your teachers find the form takes too long to complete, they may need to go back and enter class details later on in the day, which is fine, but I know myself, I often forget little details I would otherwise have added to the comments section when I need to do this. Next, we'll need somewhere to collect the information. So let's click on Responses and Create Spreadsheet. This spreadsheet will automatically be updated whenever a teacher fills in the form. I can share this sheet with the teachers if I want and I can apply filters to get the information I need or to copy and paste data for a student report, for example. So how do teachers complete the form? Well, we want to click on Send and then we get this little link icon and click on Shorten URL. This is the link that we should send to our teachers. I recommend bookmarking it so you can easily find it whenever you need it. Teachers can have the classroom open in one tab and their form ready and waiting in another tab. Let's fill it in. So I'll add some imaginary class information here and then click Submit. When I have submitted the form, I can click on Submit Another Response. So the form is ready to go again when my next class is over. The information is now updated almost instantly in my Google Sheet. So I'll submit one more entry so there's something to filter. Now if I highlight the top row and click on this button to add a filter, we can now sort the data or select a particular student name, for example, to see just those entries. So this is a really simple and importantly free way to track attendance. It has its limitations but should work totally fine for schools with 20-25 students. When you grow beyond that, you may want to look at an all-in-one LMS like LearnCubes, which can track all of this data for you automatically. And that cuts down on admin time and allows you to focus on delivering the best possible student experience, improving learning outcomes, and growing your business. So to give you an example, here on my LearnCube dashboard, I can navigate to my past classes and see a lot of details. I can see if my teacher was on time or late, the subject level of the class, lesson summary submitted by the teacher, student's rating, and here I can see, for example, the student entered the class at 9.36, he was using a computer, not a phone, and using the Chrome browser. I could also see any confidential feedback that the student sent for the administrators. LearnCube's virtual classroom automatically saves all of the materials and annotations from each class, so I can even click on the class review button and see exactly what was covered in that class. I can even see useful analytics like student and teacher talk time and whiteboard interactions. So if you'd like to learn more about LearnCube and its reporting features, I'll add some links in the video description below. I hope you found my Google Form tips useful, and until next time, happy teaching.