Wheel of Names is a free random name picker website that I learned about from Tony Vincent in one of his Tweets earlier this week. There are plenty of random name pickers available on the web. Wheel of Names is a little different than most because it not only lets you enter names, it lets you upload images to be chosen at random. Wheel of Names also lets you create a free account that you can use to save a series of wheels. That option could be helpful if you have multiple classes and don't want to enter names whenever you need to pick a name at random.
In the following video I provide an overview of how you can use Wheel of Names. Highlights of the video include:
Uploading images for random selection.
Customizing the playback of the random selector wheel.
Saving and accessing multiple random selector wheels.
Applications for Education
Besides using Wheel of Names to pick names, you could use it to pick images or words at random. In that sense you could use it as a tool to give random writing prompts to students.
In this episode share some new and neat things from the world of ed tech, share a new way to support my work (if you want to), and answered some questions from readers, viewers, and listeners like you. The complete show notes can be found here.
On Thursday afternoon a reader asked me about using PDFs in Google Classroom. She was having a little trouble with students not being able to access the PDFs she was trying to share. I made the following video to help guide her and anyone else in the same situation through the process of sharing PDFs in Google Classroom.
In this video:
How to attach PDFs directly to announcements in Google Classroom.
How to upload PDFs to Google Drive.
How to distribute PDFs as assignments in Google Classroom.
There are a few reasons why someone might want to use PDFs instead of Google Docs in Google Classroom. First, if you are new to Google Classroom and don't have time to recreate some of your resources attaching PDFs is quick and easy. Second, you may not want students editing the contents of the document. A PDF doesn't mean a student can't edit it at all, it's just a lot more difficult for them to do that. Third, the item you're sharing was designed as a PDF and will lose some important formatting if it's converted into Google Docs or Word format.
