Presentation tip

When you are lecturing or training, and found yourself requiring the participants to perform a timed activity, you can use your watch or phone to keep track of time. If you are like me, I don't wear watches. And sometimes the phone is not very convenient to use especially when you have to wake up and down the room and monitor the activities at the same time.

A nifty alternative for time keeping is using Google timer. I discovered this little trick by typing 'timer' in Chrome's address box. The first portion of the search results, as you can see in the picture, is a ready-to-use timer. It is set at 5 minutes, and you can set it for other duration by clicking on the digit box and typing your desired time.

Beeping sound will indicate the end of the timed duration. For a classroom, you may require a good pair of speaker so that the students can hear that the time is up.

What i find cool about this timer is that I can project the timer on screen so that everyone in the room can see. Thus, you don't have to keep telling how many more minutes are left. The participants would be able to see for themselves. And it cam be used to establish objective fairness in the activity: the participants will know that you have given them the time that you said you will give.

Why don't you give it a try?