"Pagers" (or "baby monitors", heh) for my students?

I teach the "largest" class of a tiny school in northern Alaska. We have small classrooms during some times which several groups are often working together on different things. Since the classrooms are so small (and many kiddos so loud), I have some groups working elsewhere in the school, and oftentimes unattended. They're usually pretty good, nevertheless, but gathering them back up is usually a chore; "Come back in 20 minutes" usually works, but sometimes they forget, or the time I gave them to work isn't long enough to conclude a mini-lesson for other kids in the classroom, and so on. Fetching 3-5 groups of kids from around the school can be time-consuming if I do it myself, and I normally keep the few kids who CANNOT BE UNATTENDED UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES (no, really, at least one of them is a known "runner" who would dash out of the school without notice if left alone, even if there's a polar bear out there) in the classroom, even if I'm not working with them directly.

Anyhow, I was wondering if anybody knows of something that could be my cheapest (since it would be an out of pocket expense) option for "paging" students to return to class? I thought those restaurant pagers would be great, but apparently they cost hundreds of dollars! Since I'm looking into these solutions, however, how about little 2-way radio systems or something? Walkie-talkies are probably no-go, since the police here use them, but something that might let me give the groups a message, or set to listen in on them for a few seconds now and again would be cool.

Submitted February 01, 2015 at 02:42AM by BuckyDuran http://ift.tt/1Dir0wu