2 minutes of talk time...

...worked great in my Algebra 1 classes today!  (see my previous post here)

I set the timer for TWO minutes (on the projector so everyone could see the countdown).  They had to talk about last night's video for two minutes straight.  If anyone in the group lost focus, spaced out, started doing something else, etc, the timer started over.  The timer restarted between 3 and 6 times in my three Alg 1 periods.  It was awesome because the students would get upset at whoever made the timer start over, and then they just went back to talking and focusing on what they learned last night.

My goal is to build them up to 5 minutes by the end of the year (which is a LONG time for my freshmen!).

Oh, and I also showed them the Educreations app on my iPad and they will start making videos next week :) yay!  Will post examples sometime next week!

Oh, and my separating students in the classroom is working well, too.  Will blog about that soon, too :)

Back to class!