flippity

Let’s talk about a completely free online resource called flippity. Flippity is a website or a G suite add-on that allows you to use a google spreadsheet and turn it into all kinds of amazing things including flashcards or quiz show.

As teachers we are constantly looking for creative ways to call on students equitably, form student groups and randomly select students. Flippity allows you to do these and much more since it has tons of templates. Flippity is a great option to make your own random name picker. You can watch the tutorial at the bottom.

Once you are on the website, locate the random name picker, then click "template" and you will be prompted to make a copy of the spreadsheet so you can save it to your personal google drive. Once it opens up you can input your own roster. You can start entering your students' names on the column "Names" It's important to mention that you should not edit any of the blue cells.

There is a second column named "photo". You have to link to a photo that its available on the web by URL so that an image would also pop up on the random name picker (This is awesome!) or you can just leave it blank. Unfortunately you cannot insert images from your computer or google drive. You have to paste the URL address of the image on the second column. To get the image URL you right click on the web image and hover over "copy image address", then paste it on the "photo" column.

If you don’t want to use your students’ photographs, you can pick an icon that represents each student, images of their favorite animal or like I said before you can just leave that column empty, don't delete it.

The last step is to publish the spreadsheet to the web. You go to file: publish to the web, click the green publish button and copy the link that it is created. Click on the Get the Link Here tab of the template (at the bottom) and that's it!