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Responding to In-Person Teaching Challenges with BLE Real-Time Location Services

Announcements regarding the reopening of schools have begun to appear regularly throughout the US. These decisions are driven not only by changing circumstances, but increasingly by an awareness that there are solutions available that will help to manage the reopenings in the safest way possible. 

  • The Advantages of Location Services in Education
  • The Ways that IT/OT Converge
  • Contact tracing can help you identify who may have been exposed to COVID-19

    The conversation surrounding the return to normal school operations has also included strategies that address short-term concerns while continuing to deliver long-term benefits in the form of the ability to provide a working and learning environment that teachers and students can trust. 

    Attendance tracking prior to COVID-19 provided the means to tell how often students were present in the classroom and, in many cases, identify absences and potential problems that could lead to decreased educational performance.

    Now, it means so much more. 

    The Advantages of Location Services in Education

    Contact tracking offers a number of advantages for any school–including advantages that may last long after the pandemic comes to an end. 

    Contact tracing can help you identify who may have been exposed to COVID-19. 

    With contact tracing solutions, including Smart Badges, you can determine:

    How many students and teachers faced exposure to an individual with COVID-19. You can easily see how many students may have been affected, which can help you make better decisions about when to shut down your classroom, when to offer deadline extensions, and how long students need to quarantine.

    Who may have been exposed. Not only do you need to know how many people may have been exposed, you may need to see who, specifically, was exposed to COVID-19. This can be achieved with Kontakt.io Infrared-equipped Smart Badges, allowing you to more easily identify, with room-level accuracy, potential contacts and quarantine students and teachers as needed. Note that only authorized personnel can access the IDs of staff or students.

    This allows the administration to easily determine when teachers and students are in atypical areas of the building. Now, they can quickly track all exposures, not just the ones where those individuals may spend the majority of a typical day. This might include a teacher subbing in a different classroom or visiting with a colleague as well as students traveling through the building. 

    Occupancy Monitoring

    Also, Kontakt.io’s Portal Beam can use existing infrastructures to monitor occupancy of physical spaces, enhancing safety and providing insights into how space is used. It also makes it easier to evacuate spaces in case of emergency, remotely check room availability and better allocate resources according to real needs.

    What spaces are students actually using on a regular basis? Which spaces see the most use? Where do you need more room? This could help you determine which common spaces are important to your school as well as helping you determine where you may need to have additional options available for students, especially as you allow options for social distancing throughout the COVID-19 crisis. 

    Pre-order our Portal Beam Starter Kit to start monitoring the occupancy in your building!

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    When students go back to school without the right attendance and contact tracking solutions in place, it can lead to significantly increased outbreaks and greater risk to students and faculty alike. Kontakt.io’s location services are here to help, contact us to schedule a demo call.