Attendance tool for Rediker

[jchalfant]

What are Rediker schools doing for Attendance?

In particular, has anyone found a software and workflow that supports period-wise attendance and follow ups through the Attendance Office?

Thank you,

-J

[emily_beckman]

We don't use attendance in Canvas we purchased the TeacherPlus from Rediker. As of 2 years ago this was the only option for getting attendance into Rediker and being able to run updated reports. We take attendance every period via the Rediker gradebook. The attendance office pulls in the attendance about 5 to 10 minutes after each hour starts. Once it's been received into AdminPlus the attendance office runs reports to see who is absent, skipping and tardy.

The TeacherPlus portal is also how teachers and staff are able to report discipline infractions like uniform violations.

This portal is also how teachers are submitting final grades into Rediker. We will be using this until we find a system that will sync Canvas and Rediker data.  I know that Clever can help with Courses and Sections along with other programs but not with grade passback. Kimono is another program that's available and can (says Kimono) for creating Courses and Sections along with doing the enrollment. They also believe they would be able to create a grade passback function.

I will find some of the videos with the process for attendance, disciplines and also grades that I have used for instructions for the teachers and staff.

[jchalfant]

Thank you Emily.

We haven't purchased TeacherPlus. I think I recall that this was positioned as an alternative to Canvas but maybe I mis-remember or misunderstood. Maybe I will take another look, but I'm not too excited about deploying (paying for) a whole other portal solution solely to facilitate attendance.

For grades, we are using the Canvas Grade Exports tool under Admin > Reports. Since Rediker AdminPlus allows import of grades by file, this is pretty straightforward and doesn't require faculty to re-enter grades into another system. The only catch is that the Canvas Grade Exports report doesn't include a letter grade, only a percentage score. (See my idea: Grade Export should include Letter Grade) So we have to calculate the letter grade externally during the transfer. Because our school requires a standardized grading scheme across all sections, performing this calculation externally is feasible. (That said, I'm still miffed that my idea didn't get up-voted or at least picked up by development as a "necessary feature" to get it implemented; it seems to have died on the vine.)

We did look at Clever. But there were some constraints related to multiple sections and also to our year-long AdminPlus courses that appear as semester-long courses in Canvas so as to create a fresh Gradebook. So we developed a custom integration with Rediker for users.csv and enrollments.csv. The v1 of that integration should be working in .test. this week.

-J

[emily_beckman]

Where in Rediker do you import the grades? We talked to them about this when we first started and they said that we couldn't import grades. We could do it once with our historical grades. If we can now import that would be awesome and the teachers would appreciate it but I just need to know how we can get this done.

We are paying for it because we have 4 uses for it - attendance, discipline, grades and contact information. I don't know of any other option for attendance and having the detailed reporting that Rediker gives us. We don't like that we have to have another system but for the details and for the discipline it's work the money for us. When I was looking at Canvas it seemed like we were the only school that was needing the discipline reporting. The other schools that I talked to mainly emailed the dean when needed.

[jchalfant]

Report Cards > Enter Grades > Receive from file (See attached.)

Then you have to play with the wizard a bit to get the correct setup in your spreadsheet. It isn’t hard though.

Thanks for explaining your use of TeacherPlus. We are on the same page in that I am aware of the need for all of these except possibly contact information. We are expecting to rely on Canvas messaging to handle most of our communication needs. Also, because we are a small school, the Dean’s office handles most of the discipline and they use AdminPlus directly. So Contact Info and Discipline have lower value for us. Meanwhile, we have Grades working and are working on our own Attendance solution. If those two continue to work as is, then probably we will stand pat.

We are just getting started and so may change our mind in the future though.

Thanks for the chat Emily!

-J

[bchamplin]

Hi Emily,

Have you found a grade solution for grade passback yet?

Have a great day,

Bill