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Thursday, June 13, 2019

New Library Website, Qwickly Attendance, and Calendar Find a Time

Library Launches New Website





Brackett Library launched a new web site on May 28. Our goal was to better organize all of our content and to improve user experience interacting with the virtual and physical parts of the library. We believe the new site will make finding resources easier. Come check out our new site at library.harding.edu.


Please note: If your syllabus or Canvas course includes links to any library web pages, you will need to update those links because we moved everything. Please feel free to contact us at library@harding.edu if you have questions or if you want us to help you update any library related sections on your syllabus.


Qwickly Attendance

I am happy to announce our newest integration to Canvas: Qwickly Attendance. 
Qwickly Attendance is an optional attendance tool that will be used in place of the existing Canvas Roll Call Attendance tool.  A few instructors piloted Qwickly last spring and found it to be an improvement to the existing Canvas attendance tool.  Qwickly has several key features that make it a great addition to any Canvas course. 

Key Features:
Flexible Automatic Grading
Automated Absent Email Alerts
Customizable Statuses
ID Card Reader
Student Check-in Mode
Unlimited Daily Sessions

To start using Qwickly, go to your Canvas course and click Qwickly Attendance on the left side of the navigation pane. If you do not see Qwickly, then you will need to click Settings, Navigation, and move Qwickly to the top section in order to add it to your course navigation pane. Click Save before moving on.

The first time you use Qwickly, it will ask you to "Begin Set-up." This is where you can set your attendance settings for the course.  Here you can set up automatic grading, and set up a grade based off of total points or per-session points.  You can also have Qwickly send an automatic email to the student once they have been marked absent.

Qwickly also has custom course statuses, so you can add your own statuses to attendance such as a tardy, extra credit, or participation status.

Qwickly offers a few new ways to take attendance. One example is the Student Check-in Mode.  You will start check-in mode via your Canvas course, and it will pull up a pin on the screen and allow your students 2 minutes to type in the code. It will automatically mark them present once they send their response in using Canvas on their phone or laptops.


There is also an option to take attendance via a card reader.  If you have a card reader hooked up to a computer in your classroom, students can scan their ID cards to be counted as present. 

Another option is that you can have unlimited attendance sessions per day. This would be great for those long classes that have a break at chapel, where you could take attendance before and again after chapel. It would also be convenient for taking attendance during optional “bonus” meetings for a class.

Qwickly allows you to easily see the attendance history for your class. By selecting the name of one student, you can pull up just that one student’s attendance history, which would be helpful if a student has a question about their attendance in class.



To learn more about Qwickly Attendance, contact the E-Learning helpdesk at elearning@harding.edu

Allison Case


LMS Support Specialist

Calendar Find a Time Feature


Have you ever wanted to schedule a meeting with several people and dreaded calling all of them to arrange a time? Google Calendar can help.

Start Google Calendar and click the button that says Create Event (the red plus sign at the lower right). Enter the title of the event and maybe the day you would prefer. Then, on the right, enter the Guests, the people you would like to invite. You can also click Rooms and choose rooms that have calendars associated with them.

Now the helpful part. Click the Find a Time link on the left.




That will create a calendar view showing the free and busy times of all of your guests and rooms. You can scroll through the day you chose. Also, there are arrows at the upper left to let you choose a different day.

When you find a time when all of your guests are free, you can click on the calendar view to select that time. After doing that, it’s a good practice to check the date and time fields at the upper left.