Looking for a randomising student picker tool.

Hi All,

I surfed in here via a link on cool free tools for use in the classroom. I felt certain that I had furled or "delicioused" a link to a site that has some little simple applications that teachers could use to liven up a classroom. I remember that one was a little .exe file that was a random student picker that might be used to choose the child to come to the smartboard or to answer a question, sort of "name in a hat style".
I was recently at a conference in London and the host, Ewan McIntosh used an application like this to pick speakers. Problem was, he was using a Mac so it is not likely to be available for the PC. Pity as it used a casino style fruit machine and looked like it would be great for the classroom. Anyone here know of anything like this?

Tags: classroom, software, tools, utilities

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Permalink Reply by Paul McMahon on February 2, 2008 at 12:31am

Well, didn't need to post this as I found what I was looking for in http://classtools.net It is in an online form too so fantastic!!
Cheers
Paul

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Permalink Reply by Laura Gibbs on February 2, 2008 at 10:16am

The Arcade Game Generator there is fun. THANKS! Do you know of other sites like that which generate Flash applications from simple data input? Very nice.

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Permalink Reply by ffoxworth on February 2, 2008 at 5:56am

Here's a link to a site that has a download for a random student picker:
http://www.lexington1.net/phs/medwards/cool.htm
It's not fancy with fruit, but it's a good, usable tool!
There are some other great game/tool templates heres.

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Permalink Reply by Paul McMahon on February 3, 2008 at 5:29am

Hey, thanks for this. That is what I love about this social networking for teachers. The sharing is spot on!
Well done.
Paul

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Permalink Reply by Laura Gibbs on February 2, 2008 at 10:05am

I use RotateContent.com to create all kinds of randomizing materials for my websites - I've got lots of general random and date-based things that anybody can use (they are javascript widgets you can put into any webpage that accepts javascript): SchoolHouse Widgets. I also use the RotateContent tool to create a student picker for a weekly assignment my students do each week - each time they reload the page a student appears at random: Blog Comments Assignment.

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Permalink Reply by Mrs. Archer on February 3, 2008 at 6:10am

Hi! My partner teacher and I use a program called "The Magic Hat". It can be dowloaded for free at http://the-hat.harmony-hollow-software.qarchive.org/.

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Permalink Reply by Paul McMahon on February 3, 2008 at 4:43pm

Wow! Another good one. I had no idea that there were so many of these out there.

Thanks for this.

Paul

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Permalink Reply by Richard on February 7, 2008 at 5:23am

Termites would partially solve your problem. It's a clever seating plan generator.

You input the relationships between students and it automatically places them into seats in your room layout. The tricky part is that it keeps students with good relationships together and students with bad relationships apart.

If you just want a random seating plan then you simply don't add any relationships between the students. But it's just so easy to add relationships in Termites, you would be nuts not to.

Termites could even generate a list of students rather than a seating plan. You simply create a long row of seats instead of conventional room layout and then generate. The net result would be a list of students. For example, four rows of five seats would be produce four groups with five members in each group.

It's available for download here.

Cheers,
Richard

http://tinyrock.com

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Permalink Reply by Another Tim on November 19, 2009 at 4:25am

For a Random Student Selector try No Hands. Once you have set up you classes and time of day you teach them, it is always ready to give you a name for your current class. Excellent on a smart board! This used to be available from the Teach-ICT website.