Meet

This is the first extension I used to take attendance back in the Spring of 2020 when we were all thrown into online learning.  I liked it for it's simplicity and ease of use.  It tracked who was in the Meet and then exported the results to a Google Sheet.  If I ran several Meets in the same day, I could choose to have each of those attendance reports as a new column in the same Sheet or as an entirely new sheet.  I really liked this extension.  Until it stopped working :(  I could not make it do what it had been doing and did not have time to fiddle with it every day.  So I tried others.  From the reviews, so did other users.

Attendance extension #2 for me was this one offered by Allan Caughey.  To use as he intends requires a lot of set up.  Entering class lists at the beginning of every session or saving them for use was not feasible for me - I saw different students in person and online in our hybrid 6 weeks of school in Fall of 2020.  I did not want the entire class list to populate when only half of those students would be in the Meet.  That would make it appear as if half of my class was absent when I shared the document with our attendance secretary.  I have resorted to simply having the list it creates for each class and when the Meet closes, that list downloads as an Excel spreadsheet (WHY?  This is Google Everything?!) that I then upload to the shared folder that attendance can refer to as needed. This extension will show the time students were logged into the Meet and will show in the next column every time the student had to log back in, giving me the total picture of their time.  It works. But it's not fancy. 

The next extension to try is this one offered by Free Finance Tools.  After installing it today I have to wonder at it's purpose.  Every time I wanted attendance, I have to physically click the extension to activate it and once I had that list for that single moment, if I wanted that list, I had to download it as a .txt file right then.  In my world, students come in and out of Meets (either by choice or by internet glitch) and I don't always know it.  I need an extension that is constantly checking in the background and recording in real time what the Meet looks like.  I suppose for meetings with adults at set times and with reliable signal, this extension would work just fine.  I have neither of those currently.  I uninstalled this extension after one day.  I also had trouble finding it in the Meet window - it seems to live under the Nod extension that I like for the emoji reactions it incorporates into a Meet.