Beginning of Semester: Attendance Setup

Navigate to the course you’d like to start tracking attendance. Please note: The course must already have students enrolled in it in order for the attendance feature to work.
Click on the Attendance link in the left-hand navigation
You will see a list of the students in your class. Today’s date will be shown automatically. Take attendance for each student. For more detailed instructions on how to take attendance, refer to this Canvas tutorial.
Navigate to the Grades link in your course
You will see that a column called “Roll Call Attendance” has now been created. At the top of the column, click the dropdown arrow, then select Mute Assignment. This will enable you to take attendance throughout the semester without students receiving a notification every time.
Navigate back to the homepage of your course.
Click on the Assignments link in the left-hand navigation. You will notice that the Roll-Call Attendance assignment has been automatically added to the first assignment group category.
Create a new assignment group by clicking the + icon in the upper right.
Give the assignment group the title “Attendance” and assign a percentage that you would like to make attendance count towards the students’ final grade. (Please note: If you would like to set it up so that the Roll-Call Attendance feature will not affect your student’s overall grade, you should set this category to 0 %.)
Make sure that Weight the final grade based on assignment groups (above the list of assignments) is checked.
Drag the assignment “Roll Call: Attendance” to the assignment group you just created.

During the Semester: Taking Attendance

Navigate to the link Attendance in your course each time you want to track your students’ attendance in your course. The students’ average grade for attendance will be populated automatically.

End of Semester: Attendance

Make sure you un-mute the column “Roll-Call Attendance” so the student will be able to see their average attendance grade for the semester.

To export a report of the tracked attendance data, click on the Attendance link, click the gear icon, select Attendance Report, type the dates of the report you’d like, and add the email address you want Canvas to send the report to.