al-caughey/Google-Meet-Attendance

Some students missed on attendance & timings of login/out wrong

Opened this issue · 1 comments

flodaij commented

Hi, I've started using this as we move to remote teaching again and am really impressed but have had a couple of issues that may or may not be user error. I have been asked to share this extension with the rest of my school so want to check first.
My issues:

  1. Some students are missed. For example today I had a class which I started with a blank class list called 11F2. It auto populated the attendance but I also asked all students to put "hi" into the chat during the meet so that I could check it was working. There were two students who have written in the chat but are not in the attendance html file.
  2. The timings seem wrong. For example one student wrote in the chat at 10:16 but the html file says that she arrived at 10:56 and departed at 10:57.
    Any help would be much appreciated.
Eagle-Man commented

Both of these issues are caused by the same thing. Google Meet doesn't have an API on the back end to allow developers to see who is connected. So, the only way to do an extension like this is to search for whose video is being displayed on the screen. If a person's video is not displayed on the screen, then they will not register in the extension. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with writing in chat.

The solution to this problem is to make sure that all students are viewed on the screen all the time. There are two ways to accomplish this:

  1. Switch your view in Google Meet to Tiled view, then use the slider to increase the number of displayed videos to be greater than your class size (max 49). This method has some downsides, namely that if someone else (like a student) is sharing their screen, Meet limits the number of participants that you can see (to 24 usually, but may depend on your screen resolution).

  2. Install the Grid View (fix) Chrome extension. This extension will allow you to display any number of participants on the screen. It also allows you to see what you are sharing with others within the Meet (which Meet doesn't do). The downside of this method is that a) it is another 3rd-party extension and could be broken at any time by a Google update, and b) the original creator of the extension has disappeared without a word, so community members have created a copy (the "(fix)" version) and are attempting to patch the extension as issues arrive, but it may not happen right away since they are not as familiar with the code.