Create your own spinner

[Obe Hostetter]

James Hollis has an excellent tutorial on creating your own spinners for games or randomly chosing your students in class. Check out his website at http://smartboards.typepad.com/smartboard/2008/11/smartboards-and-h...

[Susanne Howe]

Excellent tutorial! Is there a way to create a spinner that ensures each student will be chosen before students have a second turn? - Thanks! S. Howe - River Oaks Elem, Monroe, LA

[Barry Richard Barber]

Picture this: An image of a large box or coffee cup or basket or any other solid colored container that you would like on a background of a different color. For example, I used an image of a big white coffee cup on a black background. Put this to one side on your SmartBoard. Now write each student's name and convert it using the font you like. Make each name the same color as your container so that when you place them in (on) the container, they are not visible. Save your changes.
Now, after each student's turn at the board, they place a finger on the cup and drag out the name for the next volunteer. Keep dragging out names until everyone has had a turn. When you close, don't save the changes so that all the names are back in the container for the next round.
Easy to set up and fun for the students.
Find more educational technology here on our wiki.

[Obe Hostetter]

For example, here is a random Notebook file.

[Barry Richard Barber]

Thanks for the basket, Obe. Here's a Notebook file with the coffee cup example.

[Jennifer Gibson]

Both of these examples are great! My students love it when I use the random name generator from Lesson Activity Toolkit 2 as well!

[Julie Baird]

I've created my own spinner following the tutorial above. I believe I created it in Notebook 9 and it spun nicely stopping on different names. I now want to use it again in Notebook 10 but the spinner always stops on the SAME name. I took a camera capture of the spinner, because I remember something vague about grouped items don't spin as well and even the picture of the name wheel stops on the same name every time. What can I do to fix this?

[James Hollis]

Hi Julie,

The random nature of the spinner stopped working after Notebook version 10.0.186.1 - This has caused quite a headache for me and Harvey Almarode who worked together to refine and perfect the customized spinner. So far, we have not received any replies from Smarttech on whether this is a permanent change. I apologize for not placing a note on the blog post. I hope you'll accept my apologies.

With that being said, I am currently perfecting a workaround that uses different objects to create a random spinner. If you want to send me the file you were working on, I can see if I can create a similar spinner for you using my new technique. Once I perfect my new spinner, I plan on giving instructions for building it on my blog and podcast.

Teacher Online Training also has a fun course on creating a custom random selector that is highly engaging and pretty easy to create. Here is a video of what you would learn in the course.

I hope this helps. Don't forget to send me your spinner file so I can make your spinner using my new technique.

Cheers,

Jim

[Julie Baird]

Thanks Jim. You certainly follow your motto that "sharing is caring." However, I would rather take your course to learn how to do it myself. I'm trying to get our tech guy to pay for a year of your training.