Whether you’re a teacher, student, or administrator, it just got a lot more fun to go to class. Foursquare, the quickly growing social network that lets you ‘check-in’ to places and get badges and see who else is there, has unveiled its platform to encourage businesses to take part. While the main goal is to get businesses to sign up and offer promotions to encourage check-ins, there’s no reason schools can’t get in on the fun. Heck, it might even encourage people to become ‘mayor’ of classrooms, dining halls, even dorms. We could see RAs (Resident Assistants or Advisors) taking advantage of this new system and organizing prices for the Mayor of a classroom. In other words, students could get rewarded for going to class with something more tangible than enhanced knowledge.
Get Started
Head over to the Venue page for your school, dorm, or building you want to claim ownership of. (This should be done by administrators and people who own the building or are given permission to do so.) Assuming you are authorized, click where it says “Are you the manager of this business?” and fill out the appropriate information. If your desired building or location is not on Foursquare yet, feel free to set it up yourself.
Foursquare has taken it upon themselves to verify that you are indeed the owner. So sit tight, we’re hearing it may take up to 3 days.
Create Your Special
Time to create your special or giveaway. Something along the lines of ‘Get free food every Monday if you’re the mayor of this class!” ought to do it. Owners can add one special at a time. The first special is automatically added to the queue once ownership is verified. It’s easy to encourage joining too, Foursquare is offering to mail you stickers and badges (like the Yelp! badges you’ve seen on some stores)
Once approved, businesses will gain access to the dashboard where they can manage specials on an on-going basis and eventually control staff privileges. The dashboard is the same as the one select businesses were given early access to, so it includes the same stats on visitor data — recent visitors, most frequent visitors, total uniques — and a histogram of checkins per day.
The Future Way To Take Class Attendance?
Could this be the future of classroom attendance? Imagine if your professor could check in on a class of 200 to see that everyone, even the Mayor, is at class. If everyone shows up, a special event could be held or the class could be let out early. This type of technology is not yet available on Twitter or Facebook, but they’re scrambling to add geolocation features to their systems as well. Google unveiled its competitor to Foursquare and Yelp, Google Places, just a couple days ago so the playing field is always changing. Who knows what will happen tomorrow. Stay tuned!
How do you use Foursquare?
It’s super easy, just click here to get a quick tutorial. If you have a smartphone, you can probably download an app for Foursquare to get started. Good luck and let us know if you become a Mayor of your class or school.
[...] En nee, ik was niet de eerste om met dit idee te spelen, er is namelijk al een handleiding… (klik hier) [...]