Alice Keeler is an enthusiastic tireless promoter of Google's G-Suite for Education. I have seen three of her presentations at conferences and seminars, and she is always inspiring, always worth listening to. And now she writes about one of the latest updates to Google Classroom that catches my eye: The Student Chooser. Over the past few years, I have spent hours -- at various times -- building and tweaking ways of randomly selecting students from a class list, based on various types of roster, with various output modes, using Excel or Google-Sheets (and finding the many undocumented differences between the two spreadsheet programs). The Random picker is intended to simulate the old-fashioned popsicle stick selector relied on by good teachers everywhere to make sure we're not calling on the same students all the time. My students agreed that the popsicle-stick-selection process was often irritating but useful and, above all, indisputably "fair." (A very import...
Thoughts on education, technology, and culture, during an international career.