While roaming the hallways of the ISTE conference, there appeared SmartPass, a brand new app for hall passes with a unique workflow.
“Let’s say the student wants to go to the bathroom,” said Peter Luba as he introduced SmartPass, a new app for student hall passes. “The student opens up their chromebook [or mobile phone] and [creates the pass} and then administrators can see the passes for not just that one student but all.”
Having very recently graduated himself, along with his co-founding partner Dhruv Sringari, he founded SmartPass for the many moments when students are not in classes. Encounters in the hallway with Principals could be less of a “what are you doing in the hall?” and more of a checking digital passes routine. Order can return and problems with students texting each other for meet-ups as they skip out on non-tracked passes can be averted.
The fact is, sometimes it is hard to keep track of which student is where in the middle of a madly active classroom – and one or two or a handful can just go missing.
Luba and Sringari have innovated the hall pass with a simple user interface and given over part of the work to the students themselves, helping to keep teachers more on track with their real job – teaching.
