Random Picker - Awesome Tool

As a teacher we have all been in the classroom looking for volunteers or answers to questions and either everyone's hand is up or no ones hand it up. Even harder can been assigning groups "randomly" when the kids think we have some secret agenda to keep them from working with their best friend. Which brings us to a great FREE website for "random selection" based on perimeters set by the "drawing rules". Originally designed and regularly used for drawings and raffles, Random Picker can be "adjusted" to work in multiple other settings. Education being one of them. During the iPad Summit they used the program for a door prize raffle and it was great. Not only did we know the winners were truly randomly selected but was also got to watch it happen on the giant presentation screen live before 300 people. Really cool!! 

Last year during the ISP hosted Knowledge Bowl, I was able to use Random Picker for the team order selection. Depending on how the parameters are set in the "drawing rules" and the "prizes" are identified it works for all sort so school occasions. 

Remember to set up your account as personal or non-profit so the drawing remain free. Also important is if you want to use the same list of participants or candidates again and again to say randomly select a student to be called on, just keep running TESTS and do NOT use the FINAL Draw option. But when wanting  to "lock" the results or have them printable such as I did for the team assignments, you can run the true and final draw as the FINAL draw.

As I shared this link the Knowledge Bowl Coaches from 4 countries and 9 schools, the options of how they could use Random Picker started to multiple. Ideas included:

• assigning students to practice teams
• assigning teams to event dates 
• the organization of teams in a sequence of play
• picking the order schools would present or play

In sharing with other classroom teachers more ideas come up on how Random Picker could work. A few of their ideas were:

• Group project assignments
• Lab partners match ups
• Project or Paper topic assignment 
• Reward assignments
• Classroom Job assignments
• and the list goes on.

Check out this great site: www.randompicker.com and try it today!