Pic. 1

Welcome to Classical Attendance in Teams

The details of creation of this Power app are described in this link. Some changes occur in Microsoft 365 since May 15, 2020. Therefore, I am going to give some comments on the steps described in the Deployment guide for this application. Since it is a Power app, it can easily be included as a tab in any Microsoft team as well as in the SharePoint site associated with the team. See this page for details.

A teacher marks attendance as follows. It is necessary to select the date and the time of the class. Then the list of students is generated automatically. If a student is present, then the teacher clicks the grey check mark, which makes it green. If the student is absent, then the teacher marks the cross which makes it red. There are also late symbols as well as excuse ones. The total quantities of present, absent, late and excused students are shown at the top in the corresponding colors, see pic. 1. The data source can be the file, see pic. 4a, which is exported from the attendance tab of meeting details, see pic. 3-4. Since I also use the attendance taken at random, which is displayed on the SharePoint site through a Power app, see pic. 4, I can find among those who registered in the meeting those who in fact followed my lecture. 

Therefore, I first mark as present those students who are in the list shown on pic. 4a. Then in the "Comment" field, I can type "formal" for students, who are not in the list on pic. 5.  This means that although they jointed the meeting, they didn't listen to me. This in fact means absence. 

To avoid disappearance of a meeting's account in a class, if I have another meeting later, I always save these Excel files with attendance details to a special subfolder in the folder of my class on the OneDrive.

I have Microsoft Lists on the same SarePoint site as my Grade Books with per week attendance data for each my class, see pic. 5a. They are made by the same flows as grade books, which implies that each student can see only his/her attendance. At the weekend, I open the history tab of the application discussed, see pic. 2, and mark the absence in the attendance Microsoft List list for this week.

In case of any complain, I can easily find all details with this very useful application. I think that it is seriously underestimated by teachers.

The data saved in the application can be found in the "AttendanceRecord" list, which according to the Guide must be saved on the SharePoint site of the "Attendance" team. The list of all classes is saved in the "SessionMetaData" list on the same site, see pic. 5b-5c. In my case, I saved both on one of my real teaching sites. However, in this case one should change the students' permissions for the mentioned lists to read only.

Pic. 3

To get the list of students in the meeting, I press ellipsis, see 1 on pic. 3, and then click "View meeting details."

Pic. 4a

Pic. 5a

Pic. 5c

Pic. 7

The question is on which sites must I keep these lists? In paragraph 16, one can notice the interface of a team created at the first step. The "Staff Notebook" tab shows that it is a team of the "Staff" type. It follows that these lists must be kept on the SharePoint of the Attendance team. 

The actions in paragraphs 18 are deprecated. Instead, I just return to the flow which was created in paragraph 15, turn it on and click the "Edit" icon. I save this flow and run a Test. Then 19 and 20 appear automatically.

During Step 4, I import a Power app as a zip file. I follow the guide up to the 6th paragraph, where one should chose correct connectors. It is important to follow the directions. First, I click "+ Create new" in the window of the package import, and then I press the "+ New connection" in the Power Apps interface. The result is shown on pic. 8.

Pic. 9

I follow the default choice on pic. 9.

Pic. 11