TL;DR: Here are 5 ways to automate attendance in your Google meet or GMeet sessions
- Google Meet‘s Built-in attendance tracking (Not in free plan)
- Third-party tools such as MeetList (Highly rated)
- Chrome extensions that automate attendance
- Google forms – Use a combination of google forms and reports
- Post-meeting survey – using responses of a survey or post-session feedback form to track attendance
(If you use or purchased Zoom already, don’t worry, we have discussed how to automate attendance in Zoom here)
Alright lets get into it.
Lets deep dive into ways to automate attendance in google meet. When compared to Zoom, Meet is not as API friendly – which means it’s difficult to create automated attendance solutions on your own. However, there are a few tech or creative solutions to automate attendance in Meet.
Lets look at those 5 ways in detail
1. Automate attendance through Google Meet’s Built-in attendance tracking (Not in free plan)
As the host, you can enable this option in the settings. Once activated, it automatically tracks attendance and sends you a Google Sheets report after the meeting. The report includes – participant names, their email addresses, and the duration of their attendance. So if its a 40 minutes session, the report will tell you not only who all attended but also what duration were they present for.
Please note: Attendance tracking is not available in free plans. It is available to Google Workspace Essentials, Business Plus, Enterprise Starter, Enterprise Essentials, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Education Plus and the Teaching and Learning Upgrade users. You can read more about this feature here.
2. Third-party tools such as MeetList
MeetList is a web-based tool designed to simplify attendance tracking for Google Meet. It allows you to save attendance lists easily. It can be integrated with your meeting. Meetlist will record the participant name, first join time and the total duration they were present for in the meeting.
Please note that since this is a browser extension it doesn’t work on mobile. It will only work if the host has started the meeting from a chrome browser on a PC.
MeetList seems to be a very loved product on the chrome web store. It is rated 4.7 out of 5, and boasts of 1600+ reviews.
It has a free and a paid plan of €3.99/month. You can see the comparison below.
3. Chrome extensions that automate attendance
There are multiple chrome extensions on the chrome web store that will help with doing polls, quizzes, attendance, etc in your sessions. Some of the extensions for automating attendance are:
- Google Meet Attendance extension – This user-friendly tool allows you to save attendance automatically by right-clicking in the participants’ panel. It generates a CSV file with the attendance list, making it easy to keep records. However, you should consider that it will only generate the list of people present at that instance. If some of your students are yet to join, or have dropped off at that instant they may be missing in from the list
- Meet Attendance collects attendance data directly into a Google Sheet. After logging in and syncing your Chrome browser, you can capture attendance at set intervals, ensuring you don’t miss any participants. This tool also tracks attendance duration.
There might be other chrome extensions as well. You are advised to go through reviews and ratings of these extensions before you start using them.
4. Google forms – Use a combination of google forms and reports
This is the online equivalent of old-school roll call. You can share a google form link at any time during the meeting, and ask students to respond. After the meeting, you can look at the form responses – and mark everyone who responded as present. It’s a very simple way to do attendance in sessions.
However, following are the limitations of this process
- Have to circulate the form or remind students multiple times during the session. For example a student joining later may not know that you have sent a form
- Downloading reports can be time taking
- There is a manual intervention of preparing attendance report using this data
- Leakages as some students may just not submit the form
5. Post-meeting survey – using responses of a survey or post-session feedback form to track attendance
Another way to automate attendance is to send post-session survey or feedback forms to your participants immediately after the session. Once they respond you can consider the people responding as present in the feedback report.
The advantage is that it can be done simply using something like google form or SurveyMonkey. It also solves a dual purpose as you get feedback on your sessions – something critical to both, group tutoring or personalized tutoring or courses.
It’s limitations can be
- Might be difficult to ensure that everyone fills the feedback form – so there are leakages
- Does not take into account the qualitative part of the attendance, i. e., someone who joins at the beginning or at end – both get marked as present
Time to automate your attendance is now!
In virtual or online sessions – attendance no longer binary. In an in-person session, your student could be present or absent but in a virtual session, your learner could be absent, present for the entire session or present for only some part of the session. This makes attendance in virtual sessions even more challenging. In addition to accountability, learner progress and engagement attendance data is critical to invoicing. It is important that the virtual classroom software you are using has an option to track and automate attendance.
It’s a no brainer to Automate attendance across your sessions. It has significant advantages.
- Saves a lot of time – You save at least 5-10 minutes in each and every session. There are multiple EdTech founders who claim that with this saved time, instructors can focus more on teaching.
Read: How a Test Prep Academy got more time to teach after automating attendance and other operations
Read: How a Chess Academy increased attendance rates by automating attendance
Read: How Corizo, an upskilling institute, saved time by using an LMS for training that automates attendance - Accurate data – Automated attendance means accuracy. Don’t need to worry about your teachers or your forgetting to conduct attendance. This translates to accurate reporting, invoicing, payouts and other processes that are linked closely to attendance.
- Qualitative attendance – You can also look at critical data such as who is joining late or who is leaving early.
Attendance is critical and there is no reason for not automating it for your sessions. It is extremely simple to automate this and save so much time during your sessions which could be utilized in actual teaching or learning. ITESKUL, an international language school, listed automated attendance as one of the most essential features of an LMS for a language school.
Our recommendation is to go for a versatile LMS or a Tutor Management Software that supports both virtual and blended learning setups. Look for one that has Meet or Zoom integrations for live sessions, enabling automated attendance tracking and session recordings. Additionally, an LMS that integrates with payment gateways such as Stripe or Razorpay can streamline and automate fee collection, reducing administrative effort and enhancing overall efficiency. For example, Dublin Maths saved 100+ hours weekly after they started using an advanced tutor management software.
Are you using Google Meet to teach online – You may be interested to learn about 5 simple ways to record google meet sessions.