Google Meet Attendance Template (Non-Enterprise Version)

Google Meet does have a built-in feature to collect attendance but that is only available for people who are using the Enterprise version of G Suite, which means schools that pay for the Google tools. 

Note: If your school does use the Enterprise version, then be sure to check out my other post that explains how to use the built-in attendance feature here: Google Meet Attendance Template (Enterprise Version)

However, if your school uses the free version of the Google tools, then the attendance feature will not be available for you. So to help with this, I came up with a possible workaround to collect attendance during a Google Meet, and to track attendance over time.

So what is this workaround? For this option we are going to use a template I created that includes a Google Form for the students to submit their attendance, and a Google Sheet to collect the attendance, and then a pivot table to track and summarize the attendance over time.

See below for a short 7-minue video explaining how to use this option to collect and track attendance, as well as a link to get your own copy of the templates.

Tutorial Video (7 minutes)

And see all of my Google Classroom help videos here:

"Video Series: How to Use Google Classroom"

Get Your Copy of the Template

Click the link below to get your copy of my attendance tracking templates for Google Meet. This will make a copy of the Google Sheet and Google Form to be used to track attendance for the Non-Enterprise version of Google Meet.

Google Meet Attendance Tracking Templates - Google Sheets link

• When you follow the link you will click the "Make a copy" button to get your own copy of the Google Sheet.
• This will actually make a copy of both the Google Sheet that will collect the attendance, as well as the Google Form that the students will use to submit their attendance.

• When the copy of the Sheet is made, you can open the copied Form by clicking the "Form" menu in the top menu bar and selecting "Edit Form" from the drop-down menu.

• Both the Google Form and Google Sheet will also be saved in your Google Drive, so you can access them there as well.
• Feel free to rename the Sheet and the Form if you wish.
• Feel free to use the link to make multiple copies if you want to use a different one for each class you teach, or you can use the same Form and Sheet for all your students.

Using the Templates

Now that we have a copy of the Form and Sheet, how do we use them? So first let's start with the Form. This is a very simple Form that automatically collects the date and time and the student's email address when a student marks themselves as present and submits the Form.

You shouldn't have to change anything in the Form, but just to be safe, you should check the settings before using it with your students.

• To do this click on the settings gear in the top right corner.
• Make sure that the box is checked for "Collect email addresses".
• And make sure the box is checked to restrict the Form to only users from your school.
• Both of these settings should already be checked.
• With these selected the Form will make sure your students are logged into their school accounts and will automatically collect their email address.
• Be sure to save any changes you make.

• Now you need to get the link for the Form so your students can record their attendance during a Google Meet.
• The quickest way to get the link is to click the preview button in the top right.
• When the live Form opens in a new tab, simply copy the address in the address bar.

When you are in a Google Meet you will want to give this link to your students so they can fill out the Form to submit their attendance. You can do this in several ways including:

• Pasting the link into the chat
• Or putting the link in the calendar event
• Or adding the link as a material in Classroom

• As the students submit the Form, the data will be collected in the Google Sheet.
• The first tab of the Sheet has columns for the date and time, and the students' email addresses.
• It also contains a formula to split the date and time into two separate columns, so the attendance can be processed by date.

• The second tab of the Sheet is a pivot table that lists all of the students alphabetically by email address, and then shows who was present for each day.
• This allows you to see attendance for any day of the year, or for any student, as well as totals per day and per student.

And that's it! You can use the same Form for the entire school year as an easy way for students to mark their attendance, and for you to track all of the attendance data. Certainly there are other ways to take attendance in Google Meet, including several different extensions, but this may be an option that works well for you.

Post by Eric Curts. Connect with me on Twitter at twitter.com/ericcurts