Visual Timer - my favorite clock!

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

QR Coding! Smart phones to the rescue!

In the last several years, technology has taken a stronger hold of both our students as well as our own lives.  Our district has both an online grading system and school/teacher pages in which homework and other assignments are documented in real time.  This has been both a blessing and a hindrance to my student's (and my own) organization.

Firstly, when we were 'forced' to use the online grading book, I tried to maintain my old 'paper and pencil' system, but found it difficult to do both adequately, so I abandoned the traditional spiral gradebook.  WHAT A MISTAKE!!!  Doing everything on the provided computer system didn't allow be to color code items as I wanted, sort items as I wanted, or tab things as I wanted... and I found myself spending MORE time following through on grading and making MORE mistakes than I care to admit.

What was helpful was being able to email an entire class at once that grades were updated, or individual students with their progress report.  It also was helpful to refer parents to this program (unfortunately, most didn't access it regularly, but those who did it became a valuable resource).

Looking ahead to next fall, I found a QR code site (http://barcode.tec-it.com/) where I could create my own codes that can be scanned using an app on a smart phone or ipod that could take students and parents DIRECTLY to the page I want.  This is quite helpful for both the grading program, but also for the classroom webpage, and even in the future, on worksheets or labs for video or other support material online.  I plan on distributing both of these graphics via business cards and address labels that I had created at Vistaprint will be added to my students Interactive Notebooks and handed out at Open House and Parent Conferences.  Conveniently, I had some great discounts that I could get a TON of business cards for a very low price.

Some battles we as parents and educators will need to tackle, of course, is appropriate use of said smart devices.  Etiquette with these devices have, in my opinion, taken a nose-dive in the last 10 years to the point that my current students don't have any role models of what might be deemed as appropriate behaviors.  This sometimes is just swept under the rug as a 'NO ELECTRONICS' policy thoughout the entire school.  However, with the use of electronic readers and the large array of age-appropriate academic apps available, it seems as though we should be modeling usage rather than condemning it.  This, certainly, is a much more difficult battle, but one whose time has come.

Regardless, I'm super psyched about these QR codes and what I will be able to do with them in the future!