Today's App: Pick Me!

The app I am going to talk about today is very simple to use, but I have found it to be valuable for many reasons! Pick Me! Click the link to take you to the iTunes store for more info.

This is essentially a random name picker that has the ability to track the responses of the students who are called upon. It also allows you to store student information and photos for quick access to data on the student.

When you begin using the Pick Me! app, you will import or create a list of students on your roster for each class. You setup each class by period. You can keep this as basic as inserting their name, or you can input parent and student email addresses, student photo, and a note section for any other notes you may want to add to the student such as accommodations, etc. From here, you begin by starting a session in a class and it is easy going from here.

Once you have begun a session, you have an interface like you see on the right. I have blurred out the names and not included a photo, but you can clearly see how it lays out. It looks very simple, and it is. To me, that is really the beauty of this program. When I am in the middle of conducting a lesson, the last thing that I want to deal with is a highly involved and clunky interface. To run this app, you just click the thumbs up or the thumbs down. Each click assigns a right or wrong answer and spins to the next random student in the class. The nice part is, it not only picks random names for you, but it will track how many questions each student has answered and how many they got correct.

At the end of each session you can choose to keep the data running, or reset the data. The nice part is, you can simply email the results to yourself to keep a running tally of how each student is doing. This is a great way to track participation points in your class.

Also, if you are like me, cold calls aren't the easiest thing to keep track of. This is a quick and easy way to keep track of them. It is also a great way to learn the names of your students at the start of the school year. You can take pictures on day one and then put names and faces together without that awkward admittance that you haven't learned their names on the first day!

This app is very simple to use and only costs a couple of dollars. I use it on my iPad all of the time and have found quite a few times that this makes my classroom much easier to manage.