As I’ve mentioned on this blog before, when I’m teaching I time pretty much everything. Why? Well, for my benefit so I’m always aware of lesson segment timings, but also for benefits it has for students’ motivation. Here’s a brief guide to how to incorporate timings effectively into your lessons using ICT… :D

First of all, and this has nothing to do with technology, if you’re going to use a timing, make it mean something. ‘Five minutes’ is used so often in everyday speech that it means very little. In practice, in fact, it probably ranges everywhere from about two to twenty minutes. ‘Four-and-a-half minutes’ on the other hand, is a lot more precise. It gives those who are listening the feeling that you know exactly how long they have for the task and it is a definite amount of time. Consequently, I never give students five, ten or fifteen minutes to do something; it’s always something different – ‘eleven-and-a-half’, ‘fourteen’, ‘seven’ for example. One (rather intelligent class) at my previous school used to pull my leg about this a bit to which I used to respond that they had ‘six minutes and twenty-three seconds’ to do an activity! :p

There’s a plethora of different software programs and widgets you can use for timing segments of lessons. I find that they work best allied to sound effects. I tend to use an Excel-based countdown timer (available in the Visual bit of my Resources section) which changes colour from green to amber to red as the time allotted decreases. I manually start the 30-second theme tune to Countdown (available in the Audio bit of my Resources section) on my iPod at the same time as the clock hits 30 seconds remaining. You should see them work in those last 30 seconds! :D

Dave Stacey recommends using the Ant 4 Pizza timer which apparently does a similar job in a slightly slicker way. Unfortunately, it’s Windows only (but is freeware). Finally, again in the Visual bit of my Resources section, is a large Flash-based analogue clock that you can use. This is a bit less in-your-face than the other two options and might be better for more creative activities where interrupting students with cries of ‘two-and-a-half-minutes left!’ might not be so appropriate…

If you’ve got a favourite way of using timings in your lessons, please share it in the comments section below. Also, if you’re a bit of an expert with Excel, could you find a way for it to automatically play the Countdown theme tune for the last 30 seconds please? :p