Radio Tracking our Kids
The Enterprise Charter School in Buffalo, New York, has become the first school in the country to use RFID (radio frequency identification) chips to track their students. Each child has a $3.00 photobadge that incorporates a small radio chip that can be identify the students as they enter school in the morning. (The process is still overseen by a school staff member, to make sure that students aren’t just carrying their friend’s nametag as they skip class.) Eventually, the school expects to be able to use the cards to handle lunch purchases, library checkouts, and other activities around school. Because the tags use radio waves for tracking, the students only need to pass in the vicinity of a base station to be monitored. (You can read previous posts on this technology in the weblogs by doing a search in the box in the lower left, using the term “RFID”.)
With heightened concerns over student safety, I expect to see this technology spread rapidly. Wouldn’t it be nice to just have kids walk through the lunchline and their payment is automatically deducted? Walk into the library, pick up a book (with it’s own RFID chip) and walk out the door, and it’s automatically checked out? How about if, when they walk in the door in the morning, the computer flags them for not returning that book on time?
On the other hand, those same chips in the teachers’ name badges would track when they linger in the staff room after recess, or leave the building two minutes after the kids. Maybe this idea needs work…
You can read about this program at Wired at www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,60898,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1.