Online Stopwatch

I love the variety of cute timers and stopwatches at online-stopwatch.com. Since I use them during nearly every lesson, I thought I'd write a post about them.

When you first arrive at the website, you see this:

Click to enlarge

From here, you can use this tool to either count up or count down.

Stopwatch {Counting Up}

If you need a stopwatch, click the green arrow at the top of the screen. The display changes to this:

 

I always change the stopwatch to a full-screen display and put it on the Promethean board so that students can clearly see it.

To start, click the green button. It will turn to a blue "pause" button that you can click at any time. When paused, you can either continue timing to reset the stopwatch.

I use this when the class's investigation requires a stopwatch; we all just watch this screen together. We can also time how long it takes us to clean up and turn that into a competition to beat our record time. :)

Count Down

The other neat option about this site is the count down timer. If you go back to the home screen and click "count down," you see this display:

Click the numbers to set the time, click set," and then click "start." When the timer goes off, it rings, a bit like a telephone.

If you want to get a little cuter with your count downs, check out the table underneath the timer. It looks like this:

Click to enlarge

If you click on "Classroom Timers," you can see all of your options on one page. Here's what they look like:

You set them just like you set the "standard" timer on the front page, but these all do something different. For instance, the rocket ship on the candle has a long cord that is "lit" when you start the timer. The fire slowly inches its way toward the rocket as time counts down. When it reaches zero, the rocket launches into outer space and plays some fire works.

I'll put a timer on during an investigation {if I don't already have something I need to display on the Promethean} so that students are aware of how much time they have left to work. I find that when I use these timers, the students are extra aware of their time constraints because they love looking up at the picture to see the action.

If you wanted to be sure you could access these tools even without an Internet connection, online-stopwatch gives you the ability to download the timers directly to your computer. Learn more about that by clicking here.