An identical piece of technology that involves security chips has been implemented in the banking industry to shield financial transactions is sweeping across diverse sectors in the form of smart card readers, ranging from healthcare to higher education; industries with critical infrastructures that require an optimized safety and security strategy.
“The fundamental security advantage of smart cards and other security technology permutations is that they have built-in features making it much more difficult for a would-be hacker to steal or alter the information stored,” says Randy Vanderhoof, executive director of the Secure Technology Alliance.
Vanderhoof further illustrates how smart card chip technology has a microprocessor. “It has all the computing power of a laptop or mobile device. It can run applications, it can do calculations, and it can generate unique data as part of a secure transaction,” he explains to Security Magazine.
Beyond the Limits of Data Security: The Nexus of Smart Card Readers and Your Administrator Goals
Education leaders realize the benefits of technology in the classroom, the importance to protect stakeholder data, and the top responsibility to maintain premise security.
As a proactive school Principal, your core objectives are safety, security, and efficiency. In consideration of smart card reader technology, you may speculate:
- How necessary are smart card readers for a safe and successful day-to-day campus life?
- How manageable and fast are smart card readers in a high-population environment?
The connection between smart card readers and your core objectives can be actualized by understanding the six paramount benefits of having an all-in-one smart card reader solution.
6 Core Benefits to Using Smart Card Reader Technology in Your School District
Benefit #1: Increases Teaching Productivity: Fulfilling Targeted Roles and Time Management
Smart card reader technology enables educators to focus on their tasks in the classroom.
With real-time classroom attendance solutions, your staff saves time from entertaining classroom interruptions of tardy students. Notably, the most efficient smart card reader systems are programmed to provide alerts to late students, directing them to go to the office. Overall, this optimizes your educators’ time-management opportunities for executing their targeted role: teaching.
In addition to classroom time optimization, smart card readers offer the following supportive benefits to meet your efficiency objectives:
- Enable data-driven decisions
- Easy deployment across campus on kiosks, desktops, or PoE technology (Power over Ethernet)
- Time Clock and door access
In a Long Island high school case study, Attendance Managers’ role efficiencies and responsibilities significantly improved with the implementation of the large-group attendance kiosk technology, a nexus of the all-in-one solution that a modern smart card reader technology yields.
Benefit #2: Increases Student Productivity: Attendance and Focus
Build your students’ accountability while empowering an atmosphere in which each learner can focus on academics, eliminate distractions, and increase the students’ overall classroom productivity within your entire school district.
Benefits, such as accountability and productivity, are solely realized through smart card readers with comprehensive student ID card solutions that offer:
- Contactless and automatic identification (simple, smart ID card tap)
- Rapid premises and bus attendance
- Less class interference when late (with alerts set)
- Reduced lunchtime cuts
- Fast and highly secured building/large group entry
Research has unveiled how school districts have experienced a 33 percent increase in attendance in a short amount of time, as a consequence of implementing smart card readers.
Benefit #3: Early Intervention
Smart card readers optimize data-driven decisions and provide daily reports to leverage early intervention or identify at-risk students rapidly.
Fostering Staff/Parent Awareness of Student Behavior and Solutions
As a school Principal, you have the challenging task of overseeing the continuity of staff and parent connections. When you incorporate smart card readers within your student and staff management strategy, all stakeholder benefit and have an accelerated opportunity to work together.
How can you leverage this responsibility?
Referral Automation through ABE
Enable your teachers, administrators, school psychologists, and parents to share in their student’s behavioral and academic activities by receiving alerts of their student’s thresholds.
ABE (Alternative Behavior Educator) teaches better behavior and monitors progress throughout a student’s career while giving administrators and teachers powerful data-driven reports that quickly flag at-risk students, help monitor and chronicle progress, and support decision-making tasks.
The ABE further helps you meet your core objective of efficiency by eliminating administrative tasks through automating referrals that occur from teachers stemming from students that exhibit negative behavior or automated referrals from truancy, as examples.
The best system incorporates the complete spectrum of behavior and integrates student rewards, interventions, and tracking with PowerSchool®.
Benefit #4: Cost Effective, All-in-One Solution
The durability of ID cards, hassle-free fee payment solutions for students (such as cafeteria POS), and the actionable data that smart card reader technology provides will exceed your efficiency objective and maximize your budgetary goals.
Automated data gathered from the smart ID cards can help any K12 school district:
- Target areas of improvement
- Increase efficiency by utilizing data to analyze metrics and make decisions in lowering costs
Maximize Funding
Through the improved access to real-time, rapid data generated from smart card reader technology, accuracy-driven reports can maximize the school district’s opportunities to receive funding, such as state grants noted in the Press Herald.
Benefit #5: Student and Staff Safety = Positive Recognition
Knowledge is Power.
Knowing where your students are located, in class or absent, equals safety, helping progress the overall security of your school.
Alongside secure door access, smart card readers enable:
- Data review by Administrators in real time
- Student population insights
An extended benefit of targeting an all-in-one smart card reader solution includes remote software monitoring and automatic upgrades, which ensure that your school always has the latest software updates.
Promotes Positive Recognition and Drives Stability
The opportunity to be recognized as a safe and innovative school occurs by building community trust and driving attendance and registration rates.
Benefit #6: Securing Your Students and Staff: Internal and External Benefits
By helping protect your school premises through secure door access solutions and real-time monitoring, smart card readers enable emergency lock-down solutions that protect your students, staff, and access to stakeholder data.
Benefits Beyond the Walls of Security
Smart card reader technology transcends beyond building and door access security. Smart card reader expanded benefits include:
- Ease-of-use for helping your staff and administration implement the smart ID care system
- Back-end cloud-based server maintains detailed and sensitive information, making the smart ID card more secure
- Smart ID Cards are almost impossible to replicate
Access rights are guaranteed to be accurate and immediate with an all-in-one smart card reader solution. Appropriate cardholders are added and removed quickly–when a student transfers or a staff member is no longer affiliated with a district.
The Inclusive Approach to Your School’s Success: All-in-one Smart Card Reader Solution
As a school administrator, you can witness the impact of leveraging the extended benefits that stem from smart card readers’ ability to support the collection of data-driven reports, which are proven to advance school districts nationwide, optimize staff roles, and launch the productivity of their students.
ScholarChip’s door access system is integrated natively into the platform – no additional software or management tools are required. Our new Power-over-Ethernet devices result in a lower total cost of ownership as well as easy installation for retrofitting or new construction.
Are you ready to take charge of your schools population, performance, and staff productivity? Schedule a 1-on-1 walkthrough with one of our specialists today!
