As classrooms become increasingly arranged around technology, there are a lot of gadgets and toys that can make your life less stressful during the school year. It’s a lot easier to find these toys now rather than realizing how much they could help after the fact.
Cleaning supplies
This might come as a shock, but children can be messy. As more and more tech comes into your classroom, the dirtier that tech gets, the dirtier your classroom becomes as a whole. Invest in a few cans of compressed air (for getting gross stuff out of keyboard), monitor wipes, or even keyboard covers for the really young students.
Surge protectors
There are never enough surge protectors and outlet extenders around a school. The more devices need charging during the day, the more outlets you need available. Pick up at least one or two in addition to whatever you can get your hands on at school.
Headphones
Headphones break in schools all the time. Although your district probably invested heavily in them before the new assessments took effect, a significant portion of them are probably not operational. Invest in a few just to keep as backups or to give a student who forgets their own at home.
Bluetooth speaker
You might have a really great speaker setup for whole-class presentations, but maybe you break the class into small groups and want to show one of them an example video. Instead of disturbing the whole class, use a Bluetooth speaker for a smaller sound.
Document scanner
Although the goal for the forward-thinking teacher should be to go completely paperless in the classroom, it’s simply not possible yet. For the papers you want to save, but don’t want clogging up your desks or file cabinets, invest in a scanner. Depending on how comfortable you are, you can even let the kids use it so they can keep online portfolios in the cloud.
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