There are several technologies that fall into this category.  This article caught my attention as hypes the tracking feature as the initial focus of this technology versus the value it brings to the table.  The crux of the discussion is the embedding of an RFID chip into school ID cards to be used for tracking attendance and insuring that funding continues to the schools.  This is useful, but not the value to the public and causes debate.  How many of you ever punched a time clock?  I have on multiple occasions, well that was an early and crude form of attendance monitoring / tracking.  Why is it now that we can use technology to more accurately track and rapidly assess to take action of value with the data different?

Flip the debate and think about some of the most tragic incidents that have occurred in our schools in the last decade and one that is close to home for me at VA Tech.  When I was in school, we roamed campus freely including all of the buildings.  We didn’t have cell phones, we knew our dormmates, we phoned each other on land lines, we had an idea of where those close to us were, we stuck together in groups and I knew I could phone one of the boys from the dorm to meet me and walk me back to the dorm in the dark if I got stuck somewhere alone and felt unsafe.  So again, I challenge folks not to just look at it from a tracking standpoint, but from a ease of security standpoint.  Who’s in the building? Where are my kids? Did they make it to the bus? The list goes on.

This is just the tip of the Big Data, Security and Management of data and services coming in this next generation.

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Weeks after Northside Independent School District in San Antonio rolled out its new “smart” IDs that tracks students’ geographic locations, the community is still at odds with the program.

The “Student Locator Project,” which is slated to eventually reach 112 Texas schools and close to 100,000 students, is in trial stages in two Northside district schools. In an effort to reduce truancy, the district has issued new student IDs with an embedded radio-frequency identification (RFID) chip that tracks the location of a student at all times.  Read More Here . . .