One of my most favorite finds is my VISUAL TIMER that I use both at home and at school. It has become a HUGE time management component of my eighth graders as well as the contingent I had during July in summer school. It's sitting across from me RIGHT NOW as I type this as well!I first saw this from Alejandra's YouTube site http://www.youtube.com/user/HomeOrganizing and her own website. She has some great ideas and I needed to find ways to structure my own time at home and in the classroom - to fight off those time vampires (Facebook, Email, etc) to put myself on a schedule to get things done.
My timer can be set up to sixty minutes by just sliding the plastic disk to the desired time. Unfortunately, my students enjoy setting and resetting (especially when they're NOT supposed to!) but it since it always 'beeps' four times then stops, you don't have to stop what you're doing to turn it off. That makes it convenient to wrap up stuff and then reset it to the next option. I like that better than other types of timers that keep going until you turn them off. My colleagues like this one over my 'bus duty' alarm on my phone that sounds like the fire alarm. (If I leave my phone on my desk in the morning...it continues to go off...oops!)
I also like the fact that it's NOT an overhead model. I can prop it up on the chalkboard tray and kids in the back of the room can see it. It also shows the time remaining in an ANALOG way... something that my kids are quite week at in this digital age (It's depressing how many fourteen-year-olds CAN'T tell time on my analog clock!! I also still use the timer app on my phone, both this type of version and a digital version, but I'm in LOVE with this timer! I hope to post pictures of it IN ACTION during my lab stations this year.
I bought my two from Amazon, but you can also find information about timers like these at Timetimer.com
Enjoy! - Stefani
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