Random Student Picker for Classrooms

Built for the front of a classroom

A wheel does something a mental coin flip cannot: it shows the whole class that the choice was not personal. The student who gets called on can see the other twenty-six slices that did not come up.

This page starts with no-repeat turned on, because that is what a class needs almost every time. Each name leaves the wheel as soon as it is drawn, so you work through the whole roster before anyone is asked twice. Press Reset to put everybody back on for the next round.

Fullscreen puts the wheel on a projector or interactive whiteboard with nothing else on screen — no menus, no ads, no browser chrome. The Spin button and the spacebar both work while you are in fullscreen, so you can drive it from the back of the room with a clicker.

Set up your class list once

1. Paste your roster into the Class list box, one student per line. First names are usually enough; add a last initial where you have two Jacobs.
2. Press Save and name it after the class — "Period 3 Biology", "Room 12 AM".
3. Next lesson, open this page and load the saved list from the Saved wheels panel.

Saved lists live in your browser's own storage on that computer. They are not uploaded anywhere, which also means they do not follow you to a different machine — if you teach from two rooms, save the list on both, or use Send this wheel to send yourself a link that carries the names (up to 40 of them).

Ways teachers use the wheel

• Cold calling. Spin for who answers next. The no-repeat setting means quiet students come up as often as the fast hands.
• Reading turns. Work down the whole class in a random order rather than around the room, which everybody can predict.
• Classroom jobs. Line leader, door holder, tech helper. There is a ready-made classroom jobs wheel.
• Presentation order. Spin the running order in front of the class so nobody argues about going last.
• Groups and partners. Use the random team generator to deal the whole class into groups at once.
• Brain breaks. A brain break wheel turns a two-minute reset into something students look forward to.
• Numbers and letters. Pick a page, a problem number or a starting letter with the random number generator and random letter generator.

A note on using it fairly

Random calling is a tool, not a policy. A few things worth deciding before you spin:

• Tell the class how it works. "Everybody comes off the wheel once picked" removes the suspicion that the wheel is rigged against them.
• Give students a way out on a bad day. Some teachers keep a "pass" that a student can use once per week.
• Do not use it for anything that carries a real consequence — grades, discipline, who presents to the principal. The wheel is for the choices where any of the options would have been fine.