Random Student Generator

[kstroud]

Does Canvas have a random student generator or random student selector? (Google Classroom has one, so I wasn't sure if this was a feature Canvas has)

[Chris_Hofer · Accepted solution]

Hello there,  @kstroud  Welcome to the Canvas Community.  Thank you for posting your question.  This is an interesting question...and unfortunately, I don't have great news for you.  I cannot think of anything in Canvas that would let you randomly pick a name...for example, if you wanted to randomly call on someone in class or wanted to randomly assign someone as a group leader.  Your best bet is to use an external website such as this one: Random Name Picker - Quickly Pick A Random Name.  If you didn't feel comfortable pasting in actual student names to a website like this, you could do it by numbers...just assign each student a number, use the Random Name Picker site, and put in numbers instead of actual names.  Then, when it picks a number, match it up to the student name.  It's a bit of a clumsy work-around, but it might accomplish what you are looking for.

In searching the Community, I didn't see any existing Feature Ideas that were related to this kind of request.  So, I would encourage you to consider submitting this idea so that people could evaluate it and vote on it if they liked what you suggested.  Here are a handful of documents to get you started:

How does the feature idea process work in the Canvas Community?  

How do I create a new feature idea in the Canvas Community?  

https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-14905-75187841185 

I hope this will help, Kristi.

[sarah-canatsey]

Kristi, 

  If you have a small amount of VBA code knowledge (enough to understand someone else's code and how to edit), then there are tutorials online on how to do this in PPT. It requires making a text file with your student name, and then pulling it into a PPT slide randomly. It's easy to update the text file with class rosters. 

Here's a video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpOfnwT9YFU

This guy uses two words, but you can easily adapt to only pull one from a list. 

This is different than the directions for creating a slide of each student name and using timing settings to rotate through. 

[don_bryn]

You could go to People and create a group set that uses the same number of groups as you have students in the class.  If you have 20 students, make a group set with 20 groups.  Canvas will randomly assign one student to each group.  It's a bit unwieldy but it gets the job done.