A Fun and Free Random Name Picker

Random Name Picker is new free tool from Russel Tarr at Classtools.net. The Random Name Picker lets you input names and spin a virtual wheel to have a name randomly selected from the list. After a name is selected you can remove it from the wheel so that it is not selected again.

Random Name Picker is free to use and does not require a registration on Classtools.net. You can save your lists by assigning passwords to them. You can re-use your saved lists. The Random Name Picker wheel can be embedded into your blog or website. The Random Name Picker was written in HTML5 so that it will run in the browser of your iPad.

Applications for Education
At one point or another every teacher has asked for volunteers and not had any hands raised. In that situation using the Random Name Picker could be a fun way to select the order in which students will present to classmates.Or for those times when all of your students raise their hands for something fun like being the line leaders, the Random Name Picker is a convenient tool to have at your disposal.

Boom Writer is a service designed to encourage kids to do their best writing and share it with each other to create a small book. Boom Writer provides a "starter chapter" for a story and students continue the story by writing additional chapters. Students submit their chapters to the group. After all of the chapters are submitted (anonymously), the class votes anonymously for their favorite entries.  The chapters receiving the most votes make it into a book that students, teachers, and parents can choose to have published by Boom Writer.

Applications for Education
Here's how Boom Writer works in schools, teachers register their classes and then their students can contribute to one project. Teachers can oversee each student's writing, comment, and edit each student's work. When all of the students have written their contributions the class reads the submissions and votes. The names of the writers aren't revealed until after the voting, thereby eliminating any "classroom politics" that could happen in the voting stage. Read a case study about using Boom Writer in schools here. Read a sample Boom Writer book here.

Vocabulary.com is an excellent vocabulary study service offering thousands of vocabulary practice lists and activities for students in elementary school through graduate school. In addition to lists of SAT, GRE, and other test prep words, you can find vocabulary lists that are attached to novels, historical documents, famous speeches, and current news articles.

When you sign up for Vocabulary.com you will be given an assessment quiz in order to give you suggested lists with which to start your practice. After completing the assessment you can use the practice lists suggested by Vocabulary.com or choose your own lists from the huge gallery of vocabulary lists.

Applications for Education

One of the aspects of the Vocabulary.com activities that I like is the instant feedback for every practice question a student attempts. As you can see in the image above, if a student answers incorrectly on his first attempt, he will see the definition and the word in context.

Vocabulary.com has an optional competition aspect to it. Students can play for their schools and climb the Vocabulary.com leaderboard.