Keeping Your Classroom Devices Clean

If you’re trying to keep your immune system strong during cold and flu season, remember to clean your devices like your laptop and smart phone. This goes double for shared devices in the classroom or computer lab.

These tips and tricks will make the process go smoothly for you and your students.

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1. The worst offender is our smart phones because they rarely leave our hands. Imagine our freshly washed (for 20 seconds, with hot water and soap) hands and then we pick up the same germy phone again. Eww.

Take the time to remove the case and clean the whole phone. It is amazing what stuff can get under the phone case and stay there!

During cold and flu season, take the time to regularly clean your phone. Daily wipe downs with a screen-safe cloth will help.

2. Keyboards and the mouse/trackpad are top places for germs to be spread, especially on shared devices. We all know that kids are gross.

The best course of action is to have students wash their hands before even touching computers, but that isn’t always possible. In that case, a squirt or spray of hand sanitizer is really useful.
If your computers are set up in rows, have a bottle at the entrance to the row so that students can get some on their way to their seats.

There are also tools we can use to keep the keyboards from collecting so many germs. I like to use compressed air or a tiny vacuum first to get most of the stuff out from between the keys.

Once the keyboards are dusted, I use a 2-phase approach to sanitizing. I start with a UV Wand and then run some sticky goop over each keyboard to get them really clean. If you don’t have the UV Wand, you can use an anti-bacterial spray as long as it doesn’t make the letters come off.

Use the same set of steps for the mouse or trackpad for each device. I usually take the time to turn them upside down to clean too, but a quick spray of Lysol every day gets me by in a pinch.

Bonus points if you can get student helpers to take care of a few of the steps for you each day!

3. Remotes – ewww. Remotes are a germ breeding ground! Wipe down the remote with a disinfecting wipe at least once a day, especially if you have students pressing any buttons for you.

4. Screens and Monitors have to be carefully cleaned, but it is worth it to stop the spread of germs. Clorox has a great product that disinfects without leaving streaks behind.