Top 10 back-to-school tech items for 2024

Once the school year starts it can be tough to keep track of everyone’s activities. Set up this digital calendar in the kitchen and no one (not even dads!) will have an excuse to miss a pick-up, drop-off, rehearsal or practice. It automatically syncs everyone’s calendars and keeps family members updated wherever they happen to be via an intuitive app. It can even help with chore tracking and meal planning.

Chromebooks have taken heat in the past for being underpowered, but this laptop from Acer delivers a fast, smooth user experience thanks to a speedy 3.3 GHz processor supported by 8GB of speedy memory and 128GB of flash storage. It also has a crisp and pretty 15.6-inch Full HD display that’s great for streaming movies and TV and even playing the occasional game once your school tasks during study breaks.

Do you know where your kids are? Answer this classic PSA question whenever you feel the need by clipping an AirTag to your kid’s coat, backpack or lanyard. Otterbox’s Sleek Tracker is our favourite AirTag case. It provides durable protection for Apple’s popular GPS device, a well-made and reliable clip mechanism, plus a bit of colourful style (we like Green Juice, though Patched Jeans is nice, too).

The Apple MacBook Air still rules the roost when it comes to sleek design and outstanding performance. Wafer thin and tipping the scales at just 1.2 kg, the aluminum-frame 2024 edition is powered by a lightning fast M3 chip and has an achingly beautiful Liquid Retina display that makes movies and games explode with colour and clarity. And with up to 18 hours of battery life it’ll see you through even the longest of essays.

Artsy students can use the Cricut Explore 3 to kick their projects up a notch, taking advantage of its smart cutting technology to create custom designs for collages, posters and folders. Teachers, meanwhile, can use its writing, drawing, foiling and scoring abilities on everything from cardstock to vinyl to save time making signs and decorations for the classroom. Once you get started, the possibilities are endless.

You want a single device that has the functionality of both a laptop and tablet, as well as the power to do creative tasks like video and music editing. But you’re a student, so you don’t want to pay an arm and a leg. If that sounds like you, the ASUS Vivobook may be the machine you’re looking for. It’s powerful, portable and extremely versatile. And it has a generous 1 TB of flash storage—enough for all your schoolwork and any media you might want to download.

Portable projectors are perfect for dorm rooms and studio apartments, you can connect them to your phone, tablet or laptop to get an instant giant screen on your wall—great for researching, writing, and late-night TV binging. Kodak’s Lumas are legends in this space. The 450 is downright tiny, has its own tripod and built-in speaker, offers native Full HD resolution and comes with a range of wireless connectivity options. It’s a student’s best friend.

There’s no better tablet out there right now than the 13-inch, M4-equipped iPad Pro. It does everything a MacBook Air can—productivity tasks, creative projects, games and video streaming—and then some. Grab a keyboard and an Apple Pencil and there’s almost nothing you can’t tackle with this little marvel. It’ll be your constant companion through university and beyond.

There’s probably never been a better device to combine a traditional pen-and-paper note-taking experience with the perks of a digital platform. reMarkable uses an E-Ink display and marker to make it feel like you’re writing and drawing on paper. But it also converts your writing to text and lets you copy, paste, move and edit document elements in much the same way as productivity software. It’s pricey, but it’s a fantastic fit for students.

If reMarkable feels out of reach, consider Rocketbook. It’s a physical notebook, with 42 pages of templates for things like note-taking, planning and sketching. You can write on these pages using Rocketbook’s erasable pens, take a picture of the page to convert it to a digital file, then wipe it clean with a cloth to reuse it. It’s a tad messier than a true digital notebook, but it’s also a fraction of the price.