A bit random

Fellow NE-tweep Dom McGladdery often blogs about random things.  I don't mean random in the "no specific purpose" sense or the "haphazard" sense, but in the sense that many of his posts are about random number generators, name generators and language generators.  Very useful things.  Dom gave me the link once to the Fresher Schools random name generator, a PowerPoint based generator which is very easy to use.  You just put the children's names on it, set it off and then press S to stop it, randomly.  A good thing to keep on your USB to bring out when needed.

Last week I adapted it for my Year 4 Frenchists, with whom I have been doing the weather.  I put the eight weather pictures that we have been using on the slides and we used the resulting PowerPoint to randomly select us a weather picture lots and lots of times.  The children thought of some good ways to use it.  They are a bit addicted to playing Round the World, so we used the PowerPoint to generate the weather for each turn of that.  Then they had to predict which one would come up, earning a point if they were right.  And of course we did the "say what you see" one as well.

Here is the PowerPoint if you fancy trying it out:


I'm sure this can be adapted for different areas of language.  For example choose an infinitive, then randomly select a personal pronoun or tense and the students have to give the right part of the verb.