Alviyora

Attendance

The daily learner register

Marking a class present, absent, late or excused — and correcting it afterwards.

Written for School adminTeacher
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The daily register is one status per learner per day. It is not a period-by-period roll call and it is not tied to a subject — it answers “was this child at school today”, which is the question a parent, a district office and a court all ask.

Who can do this

Take Learner Attendance to mark a register. View Learner Attendance to read the reports. Teachers hold both by default, scoped to their own classes.

Grade 10A's register. Forty learners, four buttons each, and a counter that tells you how many are still unmarked.

Taking the register

Open Take Register

Attendance → Take Register. It opens on the first class you teach.

Check the class and the date

The class picker lists every class you are assigned to. The date defaults to today; change it to correct an earlier day.

Mark all present, then fix the exceptions

Mark all present sets the whole roster in one click. Then change the handful who were not there. In most classrooms that is three taps rather than forty.

Choose a status for each exception

Four statuses, and the difference matters in the reports:

  • Present — at school.
  • Late — arrived, but after the start of the day.
  • Absent — not at school, no reason given.
  • Excused — not at school, with a reason the school accepts. Illness, a funeral, a sports fixture.

Save the register

The counter at the top right reads 0 of 40 marked and climbs as you go. Press Save register when it is complete.

Excused is not a kindness

Use Excused only where the absence is genuinely authorised. It is the distinction the attendance percentage rests on, and a school that marks every absence Excused loses the one number that tells it something.

If the connection drops

Load-shedding and a weak signal are ordinary conditions in a South African school, so the register is built to survive both. Lose the connection while you are marking a class and the register still saves — it is kept on the device you are using and sends itself the moment the signal comes back. You do not have to re-mark the class, and you do not have to remember to do anything.

A banner across the top of the screen tells you which state you are in:

  • You’re offline — you are working without a connection. Carry on marking.
  • n items waiting to send — the connection is back and your saved registers are queued.
  • Sending… — they are going up now. The banner disappears when it is done.
Offline, the banner appears and the register carries on working.

Only the register and marks work offline

This is not a fully offline system, and we would rather say so plainly. Taking the register and capturing marks are the two things that keep working without a connection, because they are the two a teacher does mid-lesson and cannot reasonably redo.

Everything else — reports, SMS, announcements, fees, adding a learner — needs a connection and will tell you so rather than appearing to work. If you are offline and something other than the register or marks capture will not load, that is expected behaviour, not a fault.

Open the app before you lose signal

The app has to have been opened on that device at least once while online, so the browser has a copy to work from. In practice that means a teacher who used it this morning is covered this afternoon.

Correcting a register

Registers are not sealed. Change the date to the day in question, adjust the statuses, and save again. The record is updated, and the change is recorded in the Activity Log with your name against it.

A note field is available per learner for the reason — “note from mother, dental appointment” — and it stays attached to that day.

Why your class picker might be empty

The picker lists the classes you are assigned to teach. If it is empty:

  • You have no teaching assignment yet. An administrator sets those under Academics Settings → Teacher Assignments.
  • There is no current academic year.
  • The learners have no grade, so they are not on any roster.

None of the three is a fault in the register — see Set up a new school for the order these depend on.

Grades with no classes

A grade that was never split into sections has a single roster covering the whole grade. The picker shows it as the grade itself. Nothing else changes.

What the register feeds

The statuses you save here are the source for:

  • Attendance reports — by learner, class, week, month or year.
  • A guardian’s view of their child in the parents portal.
  • The absence SMS template, which pre-fills a message naming the learner and the date they were not present.

That last one is the fastest path from “Nomsa is not here” to a parent knowing: mark her absent, open her profile, SMS Parent, send.

Attendance reports Who was where, by person, class, day, week, month or year — and how to export it.Sending an SMS to a guardian Reaching a parent on any phone, from the learner’s profile — including what it costs.The parents portal What a guardian sees when they sign in, and how children get linked to them.