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UK: London College Tests NFC for Student Attendance
Newham College is distributing NFC phones to four teachers, who will tap them to the ID cards of 120 students in place of taking roll call each day. The teachers will log in themselves by tapping their phones to RFID tags when they arrive in their classrooms. The attendance data will be sent from the phones to a time-and-attendance system from Reslink Solutions. The vocational college will use the system to save time and paperwork costs for preparing attendance reports it files with the UK government for funding. Student ID cards for the four-week test have been modified with contactless stickers containing ID numbers, which get transmitted to the teacher’s phones when tapped. A successful trial could lead to a collegewide rollout to 300 teachers and 16,000 students.
While payment and ticketing get the most press for potential NFC services, time and attendance and other workforce management applications account for the most phones. But these applications are usually used for tracking the progress of home-health care workers, security guards and other remote employees. Newham and Reslink hope a successful rollout of NFC for student attendance will allow them to package the system and sell it to other schools.
* Trusted Service Manager: Defined loosely to include companies or other organizations securely distributing, provisioning and managing applications, generally over the air, on secure elements in NFC mobile phones; or licensing their platforms for this purpose. N/A: Not available or not applicable. Last update: June 2010
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