Importance of RFID Tracking System for Attendance Management in Schools

Education plays an essential role in our lives and as a result, educational institutes have become an integral part of our daily life. Technology has come up with several advanced solutions to simplify daily workflows. In the education sector, technology integration commonly referred to as EdTech has taken teaching and learning to the next level. Radio Frequency Identification based attendance management system is one of such innovative solution that has transformed one the integral educational workflows – attendance. The integration has heralded a new era of accuracy and efficiency in the education sector. Let’s have a look at how this RFID tracking system revolutionizes the attendance process in schools!

Why Manual Attendance monitoring is inefficient?

Before the invention of attendance management software, schools were dependent on the manual punching of attendance. But this human-led method has certain drawbacks:

• Teachers need to spend a lot of time marking the attendance daily. This will result in a wastage of time, energy, and productivity.
• Manual punching of attendance may lead to human-intervention errors like proxy, erroneous marking, etc.
• Teachers need to maintain the attendance registers and keep them safe to protect them. This don’t ensure the safety and privacy protection of the data.
• Parents are not notified of the daily attendance so they are unaware of their ward’s attendance scenario until the school conveys a message about the same.
• Teachers don’t get instant insights about data when they need student-wise, class-wise, subject-wise, or year-wise attendance reports.
• The heaps of files of attendance don’t help efficiently in the decision-making process and consume a lot of space.

How RFID-based attendance management software work?

A RFID-based attendance management system contains three components:

• Scanning Antenna
• Transceiver
• And a transponder

Every student and teacher get an RFID card mentioning their identity details. There are scanning antennas installed inside the specific areas, mostly the entrance of the school campus, to check for the RFID cards. These antennas are connected to the RFID readers and a power source. The RFID readers are connected to computers to send and store the information. The computer will have the Attendance management software to process and log the student information in the attendance database.

How RFID Tracking System is beneficial for Schools?

RFID-based Attendance Tracking System is really a bliss for today’s schools which are concentrating on availing the student data for future purposes. Here are the benefits offered by the system for the schools:

1. Accuracy and Deters Manipulation:

RFID-based attendance management system brings accuracy to the attendance process and is the major benefit over the manual counterpart. With almost zero human intervention, RFID-based system registers student attendance with high accuracy. The possibilities like punching attendance, proxy attendance, and false attendance are eliminated with RFID based attendance system. In schools with large students, attendance tracking becomes very tedious and there are chances of manipulation. But with the RFID Attendance Tracking System, it is next to impossible to alter the records.

2. Improves Security:

Educational institutes can automate the security systems by integrating the attendance management system with gate access control. These machines can be activated using a school-issued card, and can control access to infrastructure like labs, libraries, and school offices. The logs of entry can be used in compliance cases. Additionally, RFID tags are data encrypted, which enhances the security factor. From the data stored on the RFID card, the location of the students can be located. The RFID cards cannot be duplicated so it highly ensures that authenticity.

3. Cost saving:

Manual monitoring requires manpower plus time to accomplish the process. This time can be utilized for concentrating on core teaching. Secondly, maintaining the heaps of attendance registers is not an economically productive option. Another way to address these issues is the Attendance tracking System. Biometric attendance or other forms of attendance monitoring can be expensive but RFID-based option is cheaper and easily scalable at a fraction of the cost. Also, the minimal human intervention reduces the operating cost and provides the desired accuracy.

4. Real-time monitoring:

The RFID-based attendance management software provides access to real-time data and enables admins to monitor attendance at a glance. As the data is stored on a cloud server, teachers or admins can access them from anywhere and at any time. This is most useful in identifying the latest trends, tracking tardiness, and understanding the absentee reasons promptly.

5. Assurance to the Parents:

In the traditional attendance method, parents are not at all aware of about whether their ward has reached the school or not, or how his/her attendance is until there is a message from the school. But RFID-based Attendance software sends auto notification through SMS or Email to the parent’s registered number/email ID when the RFID card is scanned. This ensures parents that their ward has reached safely to the school.

6. Reporting Aid:

The RFID-based system offers different reports within a few clicks, with high accuracy. The faster results can help admins to make various decisions based on attendance like, which subject has low attendance, which teacher is impacting the student attendance, which class attendance is lower, etc.

Closing Thoughts!

“Punctuality is the soul of the business.” – Thomas Chandler Haliburton.