I came across a nice little intro article to iBeacons and Education here from software makers JAMF. They released the very popular Caspar mobile device management tool several years ago and revolutionised how well schools, businesses and institutions were able to manage large fleets of iPads etc. I especially liked this bit:
"iBeacons offer great advantages over traditional location services. Instead of using the device’s specific geographic location (GPS coordinates), iBeacons use a device’s proximity to an iBeacon region. Similar to how Grover taught on Sesame Street, an iBeacon knows what devices are 'near' and what's 'far'.
This is a major shift in the approach to the accuracy problem. Instead of constantly sending location data to a service, a device only communicates when it is in one of these regions. This removes liability, as the service no longer knows where devices are, only that the device is in a region it cares about."
The other thing that caught my eye which will be of great interest to users of Caspar is that it really sounds like from this article that they are adding direct support for iBeacons into Caspar itself - which means that the thousands of schools, businesses and institutions already using it will soon gain the ability to add local context to their environment!
Read: http://www.jamfsoftware.com/blog/the-benefits-of-ibeacons-for-education/