At Eduporium, we know what it takes to provide an enriched, authentic, and inclusive 21st century education that will truly prepare today’s kids for real-world challenges. We also know this isn’t easy for teachers to attain. There are burdens to innovating in education, including, most notably, high costs of modern learning tools as well as not knowing where to begin. By creating simplified consulting programs and offering every opportunity for savings on the technology kids need, we’re doing our part to help ensure every student, teacher, and parent has access to 21st century tools so that kids may receive a true 21st century education. Here are some ways we do this that you probably didn’t know about.
Custom EdTech Bundles
Anyone can track down, repurpose, and resell technology quickly and for what they claim to be the lowest price. We’re not into that. Rather, we purposefully search the entire world to find the latest, most advanced, and overall best technologies that will actually make a difference in the lives of students. Why? Each of the products we offer not only has a technological element to it, but it has an educational element as well. To us, it’s not enough to provide one or two expensive and mediocre suggestions to a teacher who’s looking for an introductory-level robotics tool for their classroom. We go much further than that.
So, that’s how our signature service was born. We know that each teacher has incredibly unique learning goals for their class of even more unique students and sometimes one or two tech products won’t cut it. They need access to five or six or seven innovative tools that help teach the concepts they want to get across. Enter Eduporium’s custom technology bundles. These tech toolboxes are custom-made sets of compatible technologies that help teachers refine their lessons with a hands-on element to make sure the learning really sticks. The best part is that whatever teachers need in their bundle, we can put in it there—even if it’s something we don’t currently have in our store! Plus, since bundles then become bulk orders, we’re able to reduce the cost and get teachers the tech they need and keep what they don’t for a price that’s even more affordable!
We’ve created 17 different tech bundles so far, all of which you can see on our store. They span all grade levels (from Pre-K through high school) and encompass all areas of STEM education, including circuitry, robotics, coding, engineering, music, and environmental education. The beautiful thing about this program is that we can add more at any time. Say you need an Arduino bundle or a Raspberry Pi bundle. We can create that for you and customize it to fit exactly what you need. Our bundles even include the extra equipment students need to fully enjoy the EdTech tools, like laptops or tablets, for example. Basically, whatever you need to accomplish your most advanced learning goals, we can help provide through our bundle customization service.
Educator Discount
Oftentimes, teachers know that they need to be doing more in order to provide their students with a relevant education. They know they should be creating hands-on learning experiences and opportunities for collaboration. They also know that STEM tools are the best way to make this happen. Unfortunately, many educators simply cannot afford to purchase additional technologies for teachers to use in their classrooms and teachers cannot afford to buy the products themselves, so students’ preparedness suffers. Well, we’ve done what we can to put an end to that thanks to the creation of our Educator Discount program, which gives all types of educators at least 5 and as much as 20 percent off the products in our store!
We carry some of the best and newest EdTech tools in our store and any teacher with an Educator Discount account can purchase most of them at a discounted rate. Teachers can obtain coding tools, robotics kits, circuitry products, and even 3D printers at lower rates thanks to our Educator Discount! The account even brings with it special, educator-only privileges, including access to exclusive Eduporium content, starter activities, project ideas, promotions and sales, and the latest news from us! All you have to do to get started is visit our website and click on the blue Educator Discount tab that appears on our homepage. There’s no lengthy verification process or red tape to go through. It’s that easy!
Our free Educator Discount Program is open to all educators, including teachers, professors, administrators, homeschoolers, makerspace leaders, and school, college, or town librarians and staff. Our focus is on removing barriers to purchasing innovative technology for use in education and helping both students and teachers prepare for the 21st century. Discounts may be applied to all purchases, except for computers, made by teachers or their organizations. We believe this service will go an incredibly long way in helping teachers get in the position to be better able to help their students now and in the long run. To create an Educator Discount account or explore some of the benefits you’ll have access to, head to the Educator Discount page.
Lending Library
Next on our list is one of our newer services, one that we like to refer to as our Lending Library. Born out of our desire to make the transition to tech-based learning as friendly for teachers as possible, this budget-friendly service is designed to help teachers get comfortable with a tech tool or group of tech tools before they buy them. Essentially, it’s a rental service in which we allow teachers to check out our EdTech products just like they would check a book out from the library! And, rather than paying the full price to try a product they’re not familiar with and not even sure if it would work well in their classroom, they only have to pay a small daily rental fee, which is usually not more than $15 per day!
We have found that although teachers want to introduce technology into their classrooms, many of them do not know where to start. They also may not know how to use some of the newer products for STEM education despite them being designed for easy integration. Teachers, like all of us, want technologies that are intuitive and that they can hit the ground running with. Take a brand like littleBits, for example. Students can do so much with the various components and now even the various different kits. Teachers, however, may not know how to get started, how their students will respond to learning with littleBits in the classroom, or if it would be worth the investment. Our Lending Library is designed specifically to answer these exact questions.
This program is designed to take every burden that teachers face out of EdTech integration. The rental period is completely up to them, for example. They can try a product for a week, a month, the duration of a specific unit, or for the entire school year! We just ask for a minimum 3-day rental—plus we think kids will enjoy having the technologies around for more than just one class! One final thing about our Lending Library program that teachers might like is the credit caveat. Since they’re paying a daily rental fee already before deciding to buy the product, we’ll reduce the cost of the product should they decide to buy it later! So, whatever is paid in rental fees, we’ll knock off the sale price, but there’s still no pressure to but after the rental periods!
Custom Quotes
So, we have bundles, we have a rental program, and now we will introduce another service that helps make the buying experience more enjoyable. Our custom quotes feature is easily accessible through the Eduporium website and gives all of our partners the ability to get exactly what they want in terms of classroom technology for the lowest price possible. We source our EdTech tools from hundreds of different vendors all over the world and the direct relationships we have created with these innovative companies allow us to get these products from them for incredibly low prices, which, in turn, allows us to resell them for much lower than our competitors, including Amazon! The real value of this program, however, lies in its customizability. Whatever products a teacher needs—whether it’s one, two, 10, or 20—can be compiled into one, easy-to-understand and low-priced quote.
As a full-scale, 21st century educational partner, we are all about making tech acquisition and implementation as easy as possible for educators. To us, this includes the research phase before teachers actually purchase technology and making this process as simple as possible. Using Eduporium’s Request a Quote feature also allows educators to save as much money as possible when purchasing new technologies for the classroom. In perusing our online store, you might notice that we have a number of different STEM solutions as well as computing products, like laptops and tablets, 3D printers, and plenty of other tools that make classroom learning more engaging. All of these products are eligible for quotation requests. Also, in the near future, we will be installing a feature in our store that will allow users to add a product directly to a quote from that product’s page, making it even easier for you!
So, how would this service specifically benefit educators? Say, you’re an administrator of a K-8 school and trying to bring more technology into the curricula. There’s no sense in only allowing older students access to innovative technology; you would want all students in all grades to enjoy an enhanced learning experience. Ordering the right tools for students in a wide age range can get tricky, however, but this feature can help alleviate that stress. Instead of placing eight or nine separate orders, we’ve made it easier on educators since we know they have plenty of other things going on throughout the school day. Just like with some of our other services, we will work directly with teachers and with our distributors to get the lowest prices possible, compile a comprehensive quote, and return it to you very quickly.
Workshops and Professional Development
Once a teacher decides to better their classroom, do some research, enlist some help, and create a curriculum that’s enhanced by technology, they are on the right path. Once they complete all of these steps, though, they’re on their own. Or, are they? At this point, a teacher would be ready to bring these EdTech tools into their classroom, but are they always fully prepared? They might get in the classroom and realize they don’t even know how to turn the product on or that they don’t have any authentic lesson plan in mind aside from just letting kids experiment with the technology. That’s where we come in. We are certified to deliver teacher professional development in Massachusetts and we’ll cover all the things eager teachers may overlook, guaranteeing they’re effectively using the technology from start to finish.
Eduporium provides various types of workshops for teachers of all grade levels and also students as well! We can come to your school or you can come to us—whichever is easier for what you want to accomplish. If your school is located out of our area, we can even do virtual workshops for as many attendees as you can accommodate! They all work in the same way and allow teachers to gain valuable insights into using technology in their teaching. We’ll go over everything, including turning products on, their educational value, their correlation to educational standards, and even provide some ideas for starter activities and in-class lesson plans because what’s the use in having technology if you don’t know what to do with it!?
In terms of options, we provide three distinct types of workshops, all of which are affordable despite shrinking budgets. We have workshops in which students can come and sample technologies through hands-on play. Then, we have more informative workshops designed for teachers in which we will teach them about a handful of products that will help them revamp their teaching. Or, if they prefer, we can create a workshop centered around one specific EdTech product for teachers who will be spending some time learning with that particular product during the school year. Our tech experts are equipped to lead each of these workshops using just about any of the products we have in our store and even some that aren’t necessarily in our store, like virtual reality headsets! To learn more about our workshop offerings or to get started with booking a session, get in touch with us!
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