Best smart home products for back to school

Smart home products are extremely useful at any time of the year, but some of them are particularly useful for certain times and events. Back to school is just such a time, which is why today I’ll be looking at a handful of smart home products that are especially useful for those heading back to school. This includes items that will help you with your studies as well as those that will make life and relaxation just a little bit easier. So if you’re a smart home enthusiast—or even if you’re not, join me today as I examine a few of these products and attempt to inspire your imagination with the best smart home items for back to school.

Smart office equipment

Inspiration for this article came from Best Buy’s Smart Office Products page. After all, many of the same products used in an office environment are also used by students doing school work. Here are a few key examples of just what I mean by that:

Smart lights

When working on paper-based work or school assignments, having proper lighting is a must! It doesn’t necessarily have to be smart lighting, but having enough light to see without straining one’s eyes is incredibly important.

While many types of lighting have the potential to be effective, smart lights have a number of advantages over non-smart lights, such as their colour and brightness adjustability, as well as the user’s ability to turn them on, off, up, or down without getting up from their workstation and taking attention away from their studies. One can simply use their smart phone to make the adjustments and keep working away on their assignments.

It barely takes a second to do, and you can even set up lighting schedules if you want. For instance, when the light over your desk comes on, you’ll know it’s time to buckle down and do some homework. Or, when the light finally goes off late at night, it’s time to close your books (and your eyes) and try to get some valuable sleep rather than pulling an all-nighter. There’s really no shortage of ways that smart lighting can help you with your scholarly pursuits.

Smart speakers and displays

Another important category of product that’s useful for those heading back to school is smart speakers and displays. The advantage of these products isn’t necessarily the device itself, but rather the smart assistant that powers it. Smart assistants like Siri, Alexa, and the Google Assistant have become increasingly useful and important in our lives in recent years, and there’s virtually no limit to the ways these assistants can help students with research, study, and learning.

For instance, a smart assistant can help you to find details of historical events to incorporate into your history paper; they can help you check your math homework if you ask them what the answers to certain mathematical problems are; and they can even help you to manage your busy back to school schedule by keeping track of assignment due dates and upcoming tests and exams.

Additionally, many meetings today no longer take place in person, but they can still be done face-to-face through technologies such as laptop computers and smart displays (as shown in the photo above). Imagine going to class via a Zoom call between you, your teacher, and your classmates. This is all now very easy to do, and going forward we’re likely to see a whole lot more of it.

Smart thermostats

Some people might be surprised to find smart thermostats on a list such as this, but if you’ve ever worked in an office that was either too hot or too cold, you’ll know why I’m including them. Being comfortable is a big part of being productive, and that goes for students as much as it does for a work force.

Luckily, smart thermostats allow users to easily regulate the temperature in their home, their office, or even their home office easily and effectively with an Android or iOS based smart phone and the dedicated app of the model they’ve chosen.

You can even set heating and/or cooling schedules to make sure that certain parts of your home are just the right temperatures at just the right times—like when the students in your life are trying to complete their homework.

Of course, Best Buy has several great smart thermostat models for you too choose from, and each of these popular models has a ton of amazing features, including an uncanny ability to help you save big on your electricity bills!

Additional back to school ideas

Before I wrap things up, I’d like to provide one suggestion that isn’t really in the smart home realm but that’s still useful for students. It’s the category of desks and workstations, as having a proper place to complete one’s assignments is absolutely vital if you want to pass in your very best work.

As it happens, Best Buy has a wide variety of computer desks and office furniture that might just do the trick—everything from standing desks and writing tables to wall-mounted desks and L-shaped corner desks. By getting a desk with just the right combination of drawers and table-top surface area, you instantly increase your chances of having success in your studies! (P.S. Don’t forget to get a comfortable and supportive gaming or office chair to prevent your school work from giving you a bad back!)

Enjoy the school year!

Finally, many older/university students often have to travel for school, or their parents may have to initially go with them when first trying to get them settled. If this is the case for your family, I recently wrote an article entitled Before you book a vacation, boost your security with new smart home tech that considers smart security suggestions for protecting your home while you’re away. Even though the premise of that article is going away on vacation, it still applies when you’re going away to help a family member get settled in a new and far off school.

But whether your school is all the way across the country, in a far away part of the province, or merely across the street, remember to enjoy the educational experience and to try and put as much effort into the social aspects of school as the studying. Balance is the key to success!