Spin your students back to action!
Thomas Courtley
Education Specialist
A spinner is an exciting addition to your lessons. It will randomly select whose turn it is to ask or answer a question. Alternatively, you can start sentences within the spinner and ask your students to complete them, or create teams to play a game together. Here are some examples of how to use a spinner for formative assessment, equality and gamification.
1. Formative assessment with the spinner
The LessonUp’s digital spinner is the perfect interactive tool to carry out a formative assessment at the end of a lesson. Questions are chosen randomly by the spinner, creating an ‘unpredictable’, yet fun and exciting classroom dynamic. Most students love to work with the colourful, invigorating spinner!
As a teacher, you decide which questions you want to insert. You can choose to work with one spinner, or more, and can insert as many different questions as you like. To see how it works for yourself, check out our free learning technique.
2. Random name picker
If you think of the random spinner component, the first thing that comes to mind is to implement it as a random name picker, by filling it in with the names of your students. The spinner will randomly pick whose turn it is to anwer a question—modernising the traditional use of lolly sticks.
If you are working in a digital class, though, once your students are logged in, you won’t even have to fill in their names. They will appear automatically in the wedges of the spinner.
3. Bingo!
The LessonUp spinner is the perfect feature for the learning technique bingo. Teachers digitally initiate the spinning of the wheel, and students have to cross out their answers on their own bingo cards. Just as they do while playing bingo at home.
If you are working with words, make sure you prepare your own bingo cards beforehand. There are online generators that help create them with a tailor-made number of words. Once done, you can send them via email to your students, or print them out. If you are a maths teacher, you can use standard bingo cards with numbers. Check out our free learning technique.
Bingo can be applied to all subjects in different ways. Herewith a couple of examples:
- Maths: indicate a number of different additions. The numbers resulting from resolving the additions have to be covered/crossed out on the bingo cards.
- Geography: indicate a number of different countries. The capitals of the indicated countries have to be covered/crossed out on the bingo cards.
- Chemistry: indicate the names of the elements. Their symbols have to be covered/crossed out on the bingo cards.
- History: indicate a number of historical events.The years these events took place have to be covered/crossed out on the bingo cards.
4. Match a question to this answer…
One of the best ways to understand a new topic is to ask questions about it. This is valid for everybody, and especially for students who are preparing for an assessment, or simply revising. Curiosity and question asking helps memorise and anchor new concepts, making learning more dynamic.
With this learning technique, students are shown a word or sentence concerning a certain topic, and they have to think of a relevant question to it. It is perfect for subjects such as history or geography, but could also be applied also to maths, foreign languages, and more. Check our free learning technique.
5. Trivial Pursuit
Trivial Pursuit is a well-known board game based on the ability to answer questions about popular culture and general knowledge: from sports to historical facts. At the end of the game, the winner is the person who scores wedges for each colour. Winning the game is the reward for answering as many questions as possible. That’s why gamification works so well.
Trivial Pursuit is perfect for revising and practising. Students enjoy the game and look forward to gaining the reward at the end of the challenge. Che out our free learning technique.
A spinner can be placed in any slide, whenever and wherever you want. It's easy to implement and use in the classroom, and is included in our free subscription. Why not give it a try?
