A Japanese university is giving away Apple Inc’s trendy iPhone to students for free, but with a catch: the device will be used to check their attendance, Reuters reports. The project, which is being tested ahead of its formal launch in June, involves 550 first and second year students and some staff of a department at Aoyama Gakuin University. The school’s iPhones are meant to create a mobile information network between students and professors, but they are also a convenient way for the teachers to take attendance in class. As students enter the room, instead of writing their name on a sheet, they simply type in their ID number and a specific class number into an iPhone application. To prevent students from logging in from home or outside class, the application uses GPS location data and checks which router the students have logged in to. "We don’t want to use this to simply take attendance. Our hope is to use this to develop a classroom where students and teachers can discuss various topics," professor Yasuhiro Iijima told Reuters as he demonstrated the application…

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