Buying A Laminator For Your Classroom

Laminating machines take your typical arts and crafts day to a whole new level

, leaving your students with a permanent item they can take home and keep for years. Here are a few things to consider when you are purchasing a laminator for your classroom.

What Type?

The first thing you will want to consider when you are shopping around is how often you plan on using your classroom laminator, and what types of projects you and your class will be taking part in. If, for instance, you will be laminating larger documents such as posters and charts, you will more than likely want to look toward purchasing a roll laminator. If you are going to be laminating smaller items, you can give some thought to purchasing a pouch laminator.

Roll laminating gives you several advantages other than the size of the documents you will be able to laminate. For instance, with a roll laminator, you will be able to do more of an assembly line sort of process, which is great for when several students - or your whole class - need to laminate their individual projects. Of course, roll laminators are larger machines, and are generally more expensive than the smaller pouch laminators, and thus may be more of the type of machine you would keep in a centralized room in a school, rather than in a single classroom.

There are some newer laminating machines on the market that use a cold process rather than heat. This type of machine has many advantages as well, chief among them being that they are safer machines for children to use (the other types of laminators can get very hot to the touch in places).

Portability

One of the main advantages to pouch lamination is that the machines are generally quite a bit smaller and can thus be taken to different classrooms as necessary, or can be stored away easily when not in use. Though, as stated above, the roll laminators are more efficient, they are larger machines that may be best used in their own dedicated space. The cold laminating machines have a distinct advantage in the portability department because most of them do not even need to be plugged in. Thus, you can take your cold laminator on field trips. For instance, you could have your students out in the field collecting flowers or leaves or similar items and they could laminate them and place them in specimen books right then and there.

Cost

As previously stated, roll laminating machines are generally more expensive than pouch laminators. Cold laminating machines are a bit pricier as well, but the cost of these machines seems to be dropping a little bit as time goes on. You may want to ask some of your fellow teachers what type of laminators they use, or if they are shopping for one as well. In some cases you may be able to share the cost of a machine, or see if the school will buy one for general use. It never hurts to ask.

by: Jeffrey McRitchie

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