Bruce Wolcott

I was forwarded an email yesterday from our VP of IT once again extolling the greatness of Microsoft Teams. Among some new “enhancements:”

End meeting for all participants – Rolled outCustom video b […]

I set up my iPad on a stand, pointing straight down at my notepad, and connected it via its Lightning-to-USB cable to my iMac.

Then I opened my Zoom Personal Meeting Room and started recording. I […]

I’m teaching two Web Technologies classes this quarter. They have slightly different focuses, and I love each of them. Part of the reason I love these classes (especially as compared to teaching Excel or Word or […]

A Fulbright scholar from the National Defense University’s presentations at the BC campus tomorrow:

Market and Competitive Intelligence: How to Analyze the Market to Outsmart the Competitors
Ellicitation […]

Always seem to be working on the BTS 165 final project. Tweaking it to make it better…

One realization I had in Monday night class last night is this: this project is, essentially, like creating your own […]

Spotted in the Seattle Times on June 8, 2015:

According to the Washington State Education Research & Data Center’s Earnings Dashboard, Bellevue College grads have higher median wages than University of […]

I just heard the first official word about Microsoft Office 2016 for Mac:

http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-delivers-first-public-preview-of-office-2016-for-mac/

Also interesting to note is that, while […]

I’m having some kind of fun playing with the various features of Bellevue College’s new Microsoft Office 365. One of the coolest, most promising features is embedding Office documents into web pages. Over the […]

When I teach Excel, I always highlight what I consider the two most important features that make Excel useful: formulas and charts. Formulas are important because they allow us to analyze, manipulate, twist and […]

This 5-year-old passed the Microsoft Certified Professional exam. Granted that the kid may be special, but, seriously, what does that say about the Microsoft Certified Professional exam?

I’ve taken the […]

I spent some time the other day playing with Canvas’s newish “Roll Call” Attendance tool. It has some good stuff and some bad stuff…
Good Stuff
I like that I can enter attendance data one time– in Canvas– and the data goes straight into the gradebook. This saves me a bunch of time over my current method of attendance, which consists of:

In class, students pass around a “sign-in” sheet. Sometimes, students who are actually in attendance forget to sign the sign-in sheet, and once per quarter or so, I actually lose the sheet before it safely gets to my office.
I manually transfer these sign-ins to an Excel spreadsheet that I’ve spent countless hours on refining to compile requisite points, and to give me all sorts of information about class attendance. I occasionally make mistakes in this transfer.
I manually transfer attendance points from my spreadsheet into Canvas’s gradebook. Again, I occasionally make mistakes in this transfer, too.

Each of these three steps provides opportunities for problems, errors, mistakes. This is why I wanted to try out the Roll Call Attendance tool.
Bad Stuff

Two problems: one relatively minor, one relatively major.
The minor problem: most of my classes consist of two separate sections/class codes, and the students do not all appear one list; instead, I have to switch between the two sections via a tabbed interface. That is, half of my students are listed in one tab while the other half are listed in another tab. And, when I switch between tabs, the date always returns back to today, even though I’m entering attendance data for a different day.

But, as I say, that is just a minor inconvenience. The main problem, however
— the killer, as far as I’m concerned– is that the Roll Call Attendance assignment counts 100 points. Period. There is no way to change how many points it counts. No matter how many times the class meets, the attendance column in the gradebook is worth exactly 100 points.

The idea, I think, is that it’s a percentage. So, you must weight your assignment groups. I don’t. Weighting confuses the heck out of me. My gradebook philosophy is “a point is a point. If I want an assignment to count more than another assignment, then I make it worth more points.”

So, no matter how much “good stuff” the Roll Call Attendance tool offers, it simply will not work for me. I’m bummed.

However, if you weight your assignment groups, you really should consider trying it out. If you’re interested, let me know, and I’ll pass along the information you need to enable it in your Canvas class.