Free tools for teaching – name randomiser

Dr Radmehr Monfared is a Lecturer in Intelligent Automation within the Wolfson School. In conversation with a Teaching Centre colleague Radmehr mentioned a couple of free online tools he has been using to support his teaching. Here is Radmehr describing the first scenario:

It is always a dilemma how to choose a student to answer a question while maintaining the fairness and equal opportunity to everyone, and also not making the student nervous.

I have come across the “name randomiser” idea many years ago. The idea is to rotate through the students’ names on the screen and randomly stop at one name.

This has been proved an ice breaker and a fun activity, while that chosen person has to answer the question. Students certainly like it.

Back in the days when our lecture rooms didn’t have internet access, I use to use a simple VB program that did the job for me, but filling the student list was a problem.

But these days, I use the following website, which is fun (with lots of interesting noises) to take pressure/stress off from the students.

http://www.classtools.net/education-games-php/fruit_machine   The advantage is that I can copy and paste the student list from my excel sheet very easily.  

Another one that I particularly like and used is   http://primaryschoolict.com/random-name-selector/  . This one also allows running a timer for students to answer the question.

[The latter is the tool shown in the screenshot above and it’s interesting to note that it was intended for primrary school use but can be useful even in HE!]