Wheel Cue for Classrooms

Why a wheel works in a classroom

Teachers were using lollipop sticks and name cards long before any of this was on a screen, for a reason that has nothing to do with randomness: the class can see it happen.

When you call on a student from memory, you carry the suspicion — sometimes justified — that you call on the same six people. When a wheel does it, the other twenty-five slices are visible, and the student who got picked can see they were not singled out.

The three things that make it work in practice:

• Everyone can see the pool. The wheel shows how many names are on it and states the odds.
• No repeats until everyone has had a turn. The student picker has this on by default.
• It is visibly not you. That is the part that changes the room.

A setup that takes five minutes

1. Open the random student picker and paste your roster in, one name per line.
2. Press Save and name it after the class — "Period 3 Biology", "Room 12 AM".
3. Do the same for each class you teach.
4. Bookmark the page.

Next lesson: open the bookmark, load the class from the Saved wheels panel, press Fullscreen, and the wheel fills the board. The spacebar spins, so you can drive it from a clicker at the back of the room.

Saved lists live in that browser's storage on that computer. If you teach from two rooms, save the list in both, or use Send this wheel to send yourself a link that carries the names (up to 40 of them).

To put a wheel on every student's screen, open Send this wheel and choose Google Classroom or Microsoft Teams (Teams on a computer, in Chrome or Edge): the service opens with the link, you pick the class, and each student spins the wheel on their own device. A sent wheel holds up to 40 entries, enough for most class lists. For student names, use first names, with a last initial where two match: the names travel inside the link, and Classroom or Teams keeps a copy of it in the post.

Ten ways teachers use it

• Cold calling — spin for who answers, with no-repeat on so quiet students come up as often as fast hands.
• Reading turns — a random order rather than round the room, which everyone can predict.
• Presentation order — spun in front of the class so nobody argues about going last.
• Groups and partners — the team generator deals the whole class out at once.
• Classroom jobs — the jobs wheel does a term's rota in three minutes.
• Brain breaks — two-minute resets, loud or quiet.
• Discussion prompts — open questions that work in any subject.
• Review games — spin for teams, then for who answers, then for points with the number generator.
• Phonics and spelling — random letters, including a vowels-only set.
• Geography — a random country with its flag, filtered by continent.

Student data and school IT

Worth knowing before you put a class list into any website:

• Nothing you type is uploaded. Names stay in the page. There is no account and no server-side storage of wheels, and the site's visit counting never includes what you typed.
• Saved wheels use your browser's local storage, on that device. We cannot read them, and they do not sync.
• Share links carry the names inside the link itself, after a "#", the part of a link that browsers do not send to a server when it is opened. That is how a shared wheel works without a server. But the link itself holds the names, and the app you send it through receives all of it, so treat a share link containing student names like the roster it is, and only send it to people who should have it. Posting one through Google Classroom or Microsoft Teams puts it in that service, under your school's own agreement with Google or Microsoft.
• No ads on classroom pages. When the site starts carrying advertising, there will be none on this page, the student picker, the team generator, the classroom jobs wheel, any wheel opened from a shared link or an embedded wheel.
• No install, no extension. It runs in any modern browser, which is usually what a managed school device allows.

The privacy page has the full detail. If your district requires a vendor review, the short version is that we hold no student records, no accounts and no copies of wheels. The privacy page lists the standard request data, such as IP addresses, that our web host, Cloudflare, processes to deliver and protect the site.

Being fair about what randomness does

Random calling distributes attention. It does not, by itself, make a classroom equitable, and it is worth being clear about the limits:

• A student having a hard day still gets called on. Many teachers keep a "pass" a student can use once a week — the wheel does not know who needs one.
• Random does not mean equal over a short run. Across one lesson, some students come up more; that is exactly what remove-after-spin is for.
• It should not decide anything with a consequence. Grades, groupings that affect outcomes, or who represents the class are decisions to make deliberately.

Used for participation and turn-taking, where every outcome is fine, it does that job well: quickly, visibly and the same way for everyone.