Last Updated on June 10, 2020 by MakeThingsReal
When it comes to choosing the best laminator for your school, you need to understand why you should be using them in the first place.
There are a lot of ways laminated materials can enhance operations at your school. Lamination makes learning materials last longer.
If you have a class where you give out learning materials on a regular basis, if that material is the same material you have used for a period of years, then you need to have it laminated as this would allow you create a single batch and reuse it every day. But if you are just handing out the usual paper, it would become difficult to use it for a long period of time.
The printed material needs to be protected from bending as well as the colors and ink used on it. When you laminate a piece of paper, it becomes hard to fold and the ink is not prone to wear.
Another reason why you need to laminate materials at your school is to keep them organized. Having your documents laminated will make life much easier for you, as you can keep them in various binders without the fear of having them ripped off. There is a huge amount of force needed to rip a laminated piece of paper out of the binder and this can reduce the risk of the document being ripped off or damaged by accident.
Also, your students will appreciate it more. Laminating flashcards will extend their useful life to a point where the students won’t worry about the state of the cards and you also won’t have to issue a new one every week due to wear or tear.
Things to consider before buying
When shopping for the best laminator for school, there are a couple of factors to be considered such as the size of the materials that will be laminated. This is an important consideration to be made. As a teacher, you will be dealing with a wide variety of materials and sizes, the majority of which might be standard letter sized paper, but there will be other sizes as well. With larger sized papers, you will be able to laminate smaller documents as well as larger ones without issue so you have the ability to go big when you need to.
The thickness of the laminating pouches should also be looked at. Most laminators for schools claim to work for all sizes of pouches (especially the 3 mil and 5 mil pouches). However, not all are capable of properly laminating a 5 mil pouch.
There are numerous reasons why you would use a 5 mil pouch, chief of which is durability. They are far more durable and are well suited for protecting your materials for a long period of time compared to their 3 mil thickness counterparts.
The type of laminating pouch should be factored into your decision-making process as well. Some laminating machines might require you to get special laminating pouches while others might have a pouch already included in the package such as cold laminators.