A few months later I found a product called the Replug Break Away Audio Cable Connector that is essentially a magnetic break away audio plug that works with any existing 3.5mm headphone jack.  Simply take your headphone (or microphone) cable from your laptop, iPhone, or MP3 player and plug in the Replug between the headphones and the device.  If you walk too far away and start to bend or pull too hard on the connection the magnet breaks away and prevents the cable from snapping its contacts or from breaking the internal connections inside the deviceFor the laptop example it probably would have prevented it being pulled onto the floor altogether, as it would have snapped off when the student walked away from the laptop.  I was lucky that the laptop survived, but it could have just as easily broken the microphone port as well. The Replug sounds like a great idea and it is priced very conservatively at around $9 on Amazon and comes in both black or white.