Cleaning a White Board with Hand Sanitizer

This is actually a trick I came up with back when I was teaching high school in the states but it still holds true.

I had to stop teaching and scrub so I could finish the lesson. Not my favorite thing.

    White boards get gross after a while, don't they? Do you ever get up and go to the board to start to  write something only to find that the background of half-erased junk is preventing anything from being even barely legible? Maybe your eraser isn't up to snuff or your new markers are a bit too hardcore for the current situation or too weak to be visible among the clutter of old letters. In any case, you can still see what you just erased or have to scrub it into obscurity to get anything like a clear unlettered space, leaving behind a mass of gray background, making everything seem even dirtier than it is.

The handy teacher's secret weapon: sanitizer!
      
    The best answer I have found to this problem is hand sanitizer, which we all seem to have about in abundance these days. For this cleaning project, avoid the gel type hand sanitizer that is better for use on hands. The texture doesn't seem to do much for the cleaning functionality on the board and instead seems to just slow down the process. A spray bottle of the more liquid variety, the kind for spraying tables and desks for example, will work better. I start by spraying down the board a little liberally, starting toward the top and letting it sit for a second.

Time to scrub!

    Then, I take paper towels and start in from the sides moving in tight circles with pressure until the left over ink starts coming off, revealing the whiteboard beneath. If necessary, I may spray part of the board again to get some of the more cakes on bits to come free, but I usually do not spray the towel in specific as I have noticed less than stellar results from this approach.

Three paper towels died for this blog post.

    Even with this dirty board, the cleaning process took less than five minutes between two adults, three paper towels, and hand sanitizer. The results were excellent. Now I feel like teaching on this board tomorrow will be fulfilling and at least less frustrating that it would have been while smudging and erasing everything constantly.