Education Resources Blog

Never Forget Your Classroom Schedule Again! With the busy day-to-day life of a teacher, it can be easy to lose track of what time it is or what class you have coming up next. Along with this, the never-ending changes within a school to meet state requirements and attempts to find the best school system for kiddos to reach full potential can end up feeling like there are always new schedules to follow and no straightforward way to keep it all together. After viewing a post on TikTok (@mrslarsenslittles) which showed the effectiveness of shrinking down your daily schedule and attaching it to a lanyard, we decided this would be a perfect way to use our VariQuest® Motiva® 400 Specialty Printing System and could allow for a simple teacher hack to be made!

We're deep into the back-to-school season, which means you're making your plans for the year - and as we do every spring and fall, we're bringing you a brand new expansion pack for your VariQuest® Design Center Software packed with new material to start this school year off right!

You can't escape reading about Artificial Intelligence (AI) advancements and how they are changing the world every day. From self-driving cars to robotics to digital assistants and language processing tools, technology is quickly infiltrating every aspect of our lives that our minds used to control themselves. How long can you go without utilizing the technology to ease tasks in your day? "Hey Google, ______" And this means that our children and students are using the technology, too - and are probably better at it! Growing up with the instant gratification of using a search engine to find an answer and asking Alexa to play any song in the world, it's no wonder they're using the tools in their immediate toolbox to "learn" and get things in the quickest and easiest ways. BUT...what does that mean in terms of cultivating critical thinking in the classroom?

Spring is fast approaching, which means it's time for some fresh new content! We've launched a brand new expansion pack for your VariQuest® Design Center Software to make preparing for springtime classes and events less stressful and more colorful! What this update includes: With the Engage Every Learner® Content Spring 2023 Expansion Pack you will receive 25 poster and banner templates for the VariQuest Perfecta® Series Poster Design Systems, 20 templates and 5 collections for the Motiva® 400 Specialty Printing System, 10 shapes, one collection, and one new font for the Cutout Maker 1800 Digital Die-Cut System, and 65 new graphics for customizing Perfecta and Motiva templates! This new content includes templates centered around fundraising, teacher appreciation & recognition, and career & technical education. VariQuest customers can find this content expansion pack on the VariQuest Resource Center, under the “Downloadable Content” section of the Perfecta, Motiva and Cutout Maker tabs!

It's official: the fall 2022 school year has begun! In an effort to make the back-to-school transition more manageable, we've created an expansion pack for your VariQuest® Design Center Software to provide even more content available at your fingertips. The Engage Every Learner® Fall 2022 Expansion Pack includes brand new content for your Perfecta® STP Series Poster Design System, Motiva® 400 Specialty Printing System, and the Cutout Maker 1800 Digital Die-Cut System. This new content includes templates centered around fall sports, activities, and holidays. VariQuest customers can find this content expansion pack on the VariQuest Resource Center, under the “Downloadable Content” section of the Perfecta, Motiva and Cutout Maker tabs!

Put on annually by EdTech Digest, the 2022 EdTech Cool Tool Award Finalists and Winners have been announced, and we're pleased to share that VariQuest® was selected as a finalist in three of its categories! In its 12th year of existence, the US-based program is the world's largest program for recognizing education technology, featuring the biggest names in edtech – and those who soon will be. The 2022 EdTech Awards honored companies and individuals in 3 areas: the Cool Tool Awards, the Leadership Awards, and the Trendsetter Awards, featuring industry products, leaders, and innovators respectively. Entered in the Cool Tool Awards, VariQuest was honored among this year's finalists ranging in everything from data dashboards to artificial intelligence to interactive coding tools.

We won! We won! And we couldn't have done it without you, our nation's best educators. The VariQuest® Visual and Kinesthetic Learning Suite was recently awarded with a 2021 Best Primary Tools for Back to School Award by the publication Tech & Learning. The Best Tools for Back to School Awards annually honor leading-edge products that help students, teachers, and families succeed in categories for primary, secondary, and higher education. This year's winners included everything from distance learning cameras to online curriculum programs and of course, the VariQuest Visual and Kinesthetic Learning Suite.

An emotion meter is a great way to gauge what mood your students are feeling in the moment! Whether it's for posting in the classroom, calming corners, or student journals, this tool can be created large or small for group or individual discussions. With social-emotional learning for students a topic of the utmost importance as children grow and mature, use these simple exercises to give students meaningful tools for managing and working through their feelings!

"...in the time of COVID." An addendum to many sentences these days as we all learn to navigate a new normal, this phrase is used for the flexibility, adaptability, and patience we've accepted as our most crucial character traits in recent months. As this has been a scary time for everyone, especially students, you may need to welcome everyone back with some social-emotional learning lessons and activities - to discuss worries and feelings. If your school is planning to welcome back students to the building soon, you might need posters, floor markers, and labels to help keep everyone safe. You might also need some ideas for personalizing students' belongings and creating disinfect-able learning materials. The Curriculum Corner has some of those ideas for you! In this latest video they've created in partnership with VariQuest, Jill and Cathy share their tips for showing strength and readiness through these strange times, to welcome students back to learning, wherever it may be occurring, with the help of the VariQuest Motiva®, Cutout Maker, and Perfecta® utilizing Engage Every Learner™ Content!

At VariQuest, we offer many tools and resources to help you enhance the learning environment in your classroom. Our interactive learning tools for teachers and students are highly effective for helping children flourish in the classroom and increase in their knowledge and comprehension of different subjects. With the latest trends in classroom technology, teachers are turning more to interactive methods of teaching, and using the various tools that make this way of relating information, data, concepts, and ideas possible. Educators have numerous opportunities to present information in a fun and engaging way through interactive learning.