It Works For Me: Remembering to Take Attendance
Remembering to take attendance during each period of the day has never been my forte. When the bell rings and class starts, it is go time. As educators, our focus for the next fifty minutes cannot be dedicated to how overwhelming our inboxes look or how much frustration we feel from last period’s behavior. No, our energy has to shift toward managing, facilitating, and interacting with whomever is currently in our classroom. While this mentality generally works for us and is certainly a major factor for our success as educators, we are, GULP, expected to do more.
Let’s take daily attendance for example, which I am required to submit during homeroom each day. I usually remember that one, and if I don’t, the office secretaries most definitely will (They usually follow-up with a phone call).
Each period thereafter however is a different story. I’ve been teaching for nine years, and always struggled with this task. That is, until recently of course, when I discovered Tab Schedule for Chrome. Tab Schedule allows me to open URLs automatically on a weekly schedule, which is exactly what I needed. Here is how I set it up:
- Install the Tab Schedule extension for Chrome.
- Navigate to Tab Schedule options.
- Add a new URL to schedule for each of your web-based course attendance pages. In our district we use Schoology so I just needed to navigate to the Attendance page for each of my courses & grab the URLs.
- Adjust the Will open every to account for each day of the week. Here is an example of how mine looks:
As you can see, my Schoology attendance page is set to load every weekday at 8:30AM, with the exception of Wednesdays, when our school runs a modified bell schedule. While I’m not always at my laptop when the attendance page loads, I eventually notice that it’s there and take a tally of day’s attendees.