Training videos from D2L

Earlier this semester D2L released free all of their training videos on how to use their various tools. The videos are captioned, effective, and listed alphabetically by tool title on the following web page:

https://community.brightspace.com/resources/videos

Attendance and Grades

I have found the following steps to be a good way to use the Attendance tool and the Grades tool. Unfortunately data from the Attendance tool cannot be pushed directly to the Grades tool. Here are the steps I take in my face-to-face history class:

1. Create a grade item that covers multiple class meetings (in my case I do two, one for each half of the semester).
   
2. Create attendance registers that match the grade items (each register will have one session per class meeting).
   
3. After the last date for each attendance grade item, export the data from the attendance register (click on the name of the register to view the data and then click the Export All Data button). This creates a .csv file that can be opened in MS Excel, where the "% Attendance" field can be used to determine the grade for that register.
   
4. Follow the export and import steps detailed in the Importing Grades post in this blog (it might be helpful to export only the attendance grade item to make copying and pasting data from one Excel file to another easier). Be sure to follow exactly the directions regarding file format.
5. The import process takes a few steps, and the third step previews the data before you import it to your grades tool.