How biometric Technology assign to the test in schools
Your school days are the best of your life, so the saying goes. I disaccord – I never really understood the bother about school. Constrained to run around adamp and freezing down field in the middle of January in short sleeves and running knickers while being yelled at by a coat- and hat-clad dictator is something I have gladly put behind me.
I have also coped to live quite happily without a uniform, and the equal goes for school dinners, homework, endless wasted rules and having to ask to be excused. Only there are some things that will ever be synonymous with school. Think back the small bottles of milk with their blue straws? The profound of the bell signalling the end of lunchtime? The joy of getting a new pencil case at the beginning of term? (Or maybe that was just me?) And, of course, the ritual of morning registration?
But technology is now composed to change school life as we knew it. Sounding more than James Bond than school rules, students at Redlands Primary School in Chippenham in Wiltshire are the first in the country to pilot a biometric-based registration system. The system controls using students’ fingerprints. Each child gives their biometric once. It is then analyzed into a 40-point data set, encrypted, and stored in a central database. When the pupil arrives at school, they register at a check-in station, which mechanically identifies and verifies their identity. If a child has not checked in by 30 minutes after the start of the school day, they are recorded as absent and a text message is sent to their parents.
The system is intended to cut administration for teachers, giving them more time for teaching, as well as tackling truancy by keeping a closer and more accurate check on absent children. These benefits are all well and good, but the foundation of the technology to mainstream, public use, and away from small-scale specialist projects, raises wider doubts.
The civil liberty controversies about the storage and management of biometric details will obviously come to the fore. They will need to be able to demonstrate that they can store such as sensitive selective information safely, precisely and securely, to convince parents that their children are not in danger of converting the spied-on subjects of a Big Brother nation. A school in California recently issued ID badges to its pupils to make the registration process easier for teachers. The school announced its plans in its weekly newsletter, thanking parents for their support.But that support never came. Instead, a media circus resulted when it came out that the badges contained radio frequency identification tags, allowing the school to continue tabs on its pupils’ whereabouts.
The civil liberty controversies about the storage and management of biometric details will obviously come to the fore. They will need to be able to demonstrate that they can store such as sensitive selective information safely, precisely and securely, to convince parents that their children are not in danger of converting the spied-on subjects of a Big Brother nation. A school in California recently issued ID badges to its pupils to make the registration process easier for teachers. The school announced its plans in its weekly newsletter, thanking parents for their support.But that support never came. Instead, a media circus resulted when it came out that the badges contained radio frequency identification tags, allowing the school to continue tabs on its pupils’ whereabouts.
The badges became a symbol of the forbidding side of technology – an emotive issue even without children being affected. Although biometric registrationis not quite the equal as, essentially, tagging children, it is maybe an indication of things to follow, and of the potential of technology. We already knowthat there has enormous immunity to databases of such information: look at the trouble the government is accepting convincing people of the viability of its ID card scheme. And the answers of the biometrics trials conducted by the UK Passport Service last year have fired negative promotion. Examinations concluded that the fingerprint technology was just 81 per cent accurate.
Technology put to the test in schools 6 October 2005 Computing 23 If systems such as the one being tested at Redlands school are the wayof the future, schools will accept to bear witness that the technology is reliable. But biometric technology is still regularly ragged for being hard to manage and insufficiently advanced. Businesses with sophisticated IT departments frequently cite such reasons as these for their resistance to borrowing biometrics. Whenever such consequences cause concern for these organisations, howwill the average school be able to cope?
The school IT department will become an progressively significant part of the school structure as technology becomes further implanted in the education process. If biometric technology proves successful in Wiltshire and is borrowed by other schools, that may be the boost it needs one of businesses, as they actualize what it cando for them.any happens, it looks as if the age-old routine of morning registration is set to convert a thing of the past.
The school IT department will become an progressively significant part of the school structure as technology becomes further implanted in the education process. If biometric technology proves successful in Wiltshire and is borrowed by other schools, that may be the boost it needs one of businesses, as they actualize what it cando for them.any happens, it looks as if the age-old routine of morning registration is set to convert a thing of the past.
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