As you know, I advocate for the teacher to have their ukulele amplified, if possible.  Of course, buying an electric ukulele is not always your best option - you'll pay a premium for that added pickup, and you really want it to sound best acoustic.  

Never fear, though...run to your local dollar store and buy that door alarm for a dollar, and you're on your way to making your own pickup!  The first video below is a quick demonstration & "summary" video with lots of sped-up video so you get the general idea.  A more complete tutorial is below that if you want to sit through that whole thing!

I'm excited about the prospect of Aquila's new strings that they are making for the classroom! The Aquila Kids Educational strings are multi-colored, which on the surface would normally be a turn-off for me, until I thought about it again. I can't tell you how often I have to go through a routine of explaining to students exactly WHICH string is the first string, second string, etc. even though we test on it, have several ways of remembering (they're like the floors of the building...first floor, second floor, etc. "A" is the first letter of the alphabet, and the first string...).  However, it just doesn't stick with most of them, which is also understandable.  I love the idea of being able to just say "Red String" or "Blue String" etc. 

HOWEVER - they have NOT been easy to get information on how to order them! After contacting Cordoba (Aquila's US distributor), and they were no help, I posted a question on UkuleleUnderground.com, and got an immediate response from the owner of the company.  Will keep you posted here on what develops! I'm eager to try them out, as my fishing line experiment has had mixed results, and I see some real pedagogical benefit to the colored strings, especially with my students with processing issues.

Did you know that Sibelius allows you to color individual notes?  My plan is to color the notes for some of the exercises according to the string they are located on.  I can imagine that this will help my more advanced kids, too, as we introduce the concept of the same pitch being located on multiple strings, and which string they should play that note on.

My mind spins...

I generally recommend that a teacher have an acoustic-electric ukulele to teach with. It makes it easier for the students to follow you when you are playing as a class.

Many of us didn't purchase an electric as their first instrument, however.  Truly, this is probably a good thing for most of us, since you'll probably get a better instrument at the same price point if it doesn't have a pickup installed already.

In a pinch, you can put a pickup in your ukulele with a little (and I mean a LITTLE) craftiness and less than $5. All you need is a $1 door alarm from the dollar store of your choice (plus you get 3 of those little batteries your kids' hex bugs eat for breakfast!), a little soldering know-how (or have a friend, colleague, or music parent you can con...er...persuade to assist), a bit of wire, and an input jack. There's some a sundry items most can find laying around the house, too, but I'll give a more detailed tutorial later. (A bit of searching online can find the basics, especially at cigarboxnation.com, but you have to do some wading around to find the information you want...) 

Here's a basic video more to show that it CAN be done, rather than HOW to do it.  I'll put up a blog post of how to do it as soon as I find an instrument to do it to! (If for no other reason than there's  a misspelled word in this video, and it makes me twitch every time I see it!)

Depending on your students & instruments, you may or may not find that you need to replace strings a lot.  This can vastly add to your budget, considering decent strings normally cost anywhere from $5 a set to $8 per set! Replacing your strings with fishing line can allow you to put great-sounding strings on your instruments for around $2 per set!  Even better, it can be a way to involve your school community and parents in directly supporting your program! There's lots of fishermen out there in your community that have LOTS of extra line laying around, and I've found that they love the idea of re-purposing it to help their schools!

This isn't a new idea - ukulele players have been using fishing line on their instruments for years, and are always looking for something to make their instrument sound "just a bit better."  However, for your individual player, buying even 25 yards of string to put strings on just a few instruments doesn't make a whole lot of financial sense, unless you're already using that string to fish with.  However, if you have a classroom set of instruments, it's perfect! There's a pretty extensive discussion on this on Barry Maz's GotAUkulele site. (Great resource to poke around at, and lots of fun rants and reviews!)

There's enough to say about this for its own page, so see more about using fishing line for strings on my String Comparison Page.