This morning I answered an email from a reader named Brian who wrote,

“I’m looking for a way to upload photos of my students so I can randomly have the site select a photo. (The students are learning how to use adjectives to describe themselves and I would like to project a face onto the screen randomly)

I can’t seem to find a site or a method that makes it easy to accomplish this feat…

Any ideas?”

I think Brian’s idea is a good one and one that can be accomplished with the random name picker template offered by Flippity.

Flippity’s random name picker template lets you enter a list of names and a list of pictures into a Google Sheet to then randomly select names with corresponding pictures. The trick of adding pictures to the template is that the pictures must be hosted online so that you can link to them in your Google Sheet.

While Flippity’s random name picker template was designed for randomly selecting a student from a list, you could substitute any words or phrases in place of names and insert pictures of anything that you like. You could insert a list of story starter words and pictures for your students to write about. Run the picker whenever you want students to see a new writing prompt.