Education & The IoT: How Educational Institutions Can Benefit From A Cross-Vertical Asset Tracking Solution

No advancement has transformed education so much as the computer. Now, as computers continue to become smaller and cheaper, they’re in more classrooms than ever before. In order to adapt to our increasingly digital world, students are harnessing the Internet of Things and developing a letter of technological literacy that surpasses anything their parents could have dreamed of. Such advanced technology requires an equally advanced solution for keeping track of it all. Asset Panda helps schools tag, monitor, and maintain their ever-growing computer inventory so teachers can focus their time where it belongs: on their students.

In December 2017, the Louisiana school district that encompasses New Orleans and its suburbs had some explaining to do. Over past three years, the Recovery School District had lost $5.4 million in “unlocated property,” with most of that value coming from lost technology assets.

More than $217,000 in equipment went missing in the fiscal year that ended in June 2016. Since public school assets are public property, this became a state government issue, too.

Eventually, the school brought in state auditors to determine what the problem was. Auditors looked at the records for the 38 New Orleans charter schools in the district and determined that they all need to take better precautions to “accurately report equipment as required by state equipment regulations” and “maintain accurate information.”

As computers and electronic devices increasingly become a fixture in schools all over the country, this problem is only going to get bigger for the Recovery School District in Louisiana if it doesn't deal with it soon. An optimal solution would be for the district to implement a relational database that tags and tracks technology assets so teachers don’t have to.