The other day during lunch, I lamented that I still needed to update my inventory for my classroom. That’s when our industrial tech teacher shared how he did inventory.

Photos.

I can only imagine the nightmare of trying to inventory a woods shop, like him, or a science lab, or an equipment room for physical education. His solution, however, was to take a photo of each area of his shop, knocking his inventory time down to mere minutes.

So I adopted his brilliance and did the same:

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My one regret is that I didn’t take the  photographs before two of my marvelous students boxed up my library; having the books all shelved rather than in boxes would be much more effective and time-saving. In the past, I’ve only put a $ estimate on my library books, not wanting to spend the hours it would take to inventory each on individually.  Taking a photo of each shelf would give me evidence of all my titles should a catastrophe strike and I needed to reorder my entire library.

But doing this saved me the time of counting, counting, counting textbooks. And if I do need an exact number, I can go to my original photo and zoom in.

Thanks to my colleague, Devin Muirhead, for this teacher hack.