::A Geek in Korea::

There was a tech support guy running around the school today. He was doing something with wiring and the computers. We weren’t told what he was up to, but there were two plastic and metal plates mounted to the sides of the secretary’s desk near the hallway to half of the classrooms of the school. It looked like two defibrillator paddles hooked up to a compuer on the side of the desk.I asked the director what the heck was going on with all of this.

It turned out the panels were sensors set to look for some sort of identification cards the students will wear starting this week. The students will keep these cards in their bags, and when they walk into school, or leave school, they will have to pass by these scanners to “log in” or “log out”. Imagine a checkout line in a grocery store.

The students coming in will rub their backpacks past this scanner and be counted present, then when the school lets out, the teachers will march them by the sensors and see them to the elevator. The computer will then record when they arrive and when they leave, which will then be uploaded to the Internet. Parents will then be able to track their children movement into the school, and when they leave. The computer will automatically send the parents an SMS message upon arrival and departure.

I guess this is eventually going to replace the attendance roll call we do by hand. If it works practically, which I’ll give a 20% chance of ever occurring. Students that lose their ID card, have no bag, come excessively early, or get incorrectly scanned will plague this system. I also don’t know how they know who is arriving, and who is leaving. If it requires someone to switch between the two settings, it’s worse than the system we have now, because there are tons of students running around at break, and no teachers know what all students are doing at all times of the day.

Paranoid parents already have GPS phones that can check the location of their children. They can call their children too. Students as young as seven carry expensive phones for this reason. This is just one more way to keep track of kids. I find it a bit excessive myself.