Calling on students at random is one of the oldest classroom participation strategies. It is also one of those simple practices that becomes surprisingly awkward in an online class.
In a physical classroom, the teacher can look around the room, choose a student, pull a name from a cup, or use a deck of index cards. Everybody understands what is happening. The selected student responds and the lesson moves on.
A remote class presents complications. The teacher may be looking at a video-meeting roster, a separate lesson, a browser window containing the activity, and perhaps a handwritten list of names. Students may be muted. Some may not have working microphones. Others may be attending from a classroom where speaking individually is difficult.
The new WordStudy Live Call-On feature attempts to restore this useful classroom routine without requiring teachers to manage yet another list.
Students Join the Session
The teacher begins with an existing WordStudy activity and selects the option to start a live session. The host page produces a student join link, much like the links used by other Innovation Assessments live activities.
The room number is already included in the link. The teacher can copy it into Zoom chat, Canvas, Google Classroom, or another system used to communicate with students.
As students open the link and join, their names appear automatically on the teacher’s host screen.
This replaces the original version of the call-on tool, which required the teacher to type every participant’s name. That method was functional for a small group, but entering a full class roster at the beginning of every session was not an especially good use of instructional time.
Automatic registration also tells the teacher who has actually reached the activity. A student appearing in the video meeting does not necessarily mean that the student has opened the lesson. The live roster provides quick confirmation.
Everybody Might Be Next
Once the class has joined, the teacher can use the call-on control to select a student.
The student’s name appears prominently on the teacher’s screen. On the selected student’s screen, a clear Your Turn message appears. Other students remain able to follow the activity and prepare themselves for a possible turn.
The value of random call-on is not merely that it distributes participation more evenly. It changes the way students attend to a lesson.
If volunteers provide every answer, the same few confident students may carry the discussion while others become spectators. When anybody may be called, students have a reason to consider each prompt before a name is selected.
This does not mean that random call-on should be used to embarrass an unprepared learner. Like any classroom method, it depends on the teacher’s judgment and knowledge of the students. It works best when the atmosphere communicates, “We are all thinking together,” rather than, “I am trying to catch somebody who was not paying attention.”
Spoken or Typed Responses
WordStudy Live Call-On is naturally suited to spoken responses. A teacher might display a vocabulary cue and ask the selected student to supply the response, pronounce a word, use it in a sentence, or explain a distinction.
Audio is not always practical, however.
A student’s microphone may not work. The learner may be sitting in a supervised room where several online classes are occurring at once. Background noise may make speaking difficult. Some students may also have accommodations that make a written response more appropriate.
The teacher can therefore enable an optional response box on the student screen. When selected, the student may type and submit an answer. That response appears on the teacher’s host page.
This gives the teacher a useful alternative without changing the basic activity. The class still sees a cue, a student is still selected, and that student still produces a response. Only the method of delivery changes.
The typed-response option can also be pedagogically useful in its own right. A language teacher might want to inspect spelling or accents. A teacher may ask for a short definition and then use the submitted wording as the beginning of a class discussion.
Built from an Existing WordStudy
The live session does not require the teacher to create another copy of the vocabulary list.
It begins with a WordStudy activity that is already part of the course. The same cues and responses used for individual study can become the basis of a synchronous classroom exercise.
This matters because teachers already spend enough time preparing materials. A live feature is much more useful when it can reuse an activity that serves other instructional purposes.
Students might first study a WordStudy independently. The teacher could then use the same material for live recall practice. Later, students might complete its quiz. The content remains familiar while the cognitive task changes from recognition and private rehearsal to public retrieval.
Retrieval practice is one of the most useful things a student can do with learned material. Attempting to produce an answer strengthens memory differently from simply rereading it. The possibility of being called also encourages every student to attempt that retrieval, even when only one student ultimately answers aloud.
A Simple Host Screen
The host page is intentionally focused.
The current call-on occupies the most prominent position. The roster of students who joined appears lower on the page in smaller type so that it remains available without competing visually with the current student.
The teacher controls whether typed responses are permitted and can see a submitted response when that option is in use.
The teacher host and student participant pages also omit the ordinary top and side navigation bars. During a live session, those application controls would add clutter and provide opportunities to navigate away accidentally. The live activity should look like the immediate classroom task it is.
Useful Beyond Vocabulary Translation
WordStudy often contains a cue and a response, but those two fields can represent many relationships.
A live call-on session might ask students to provide:
- A foreign-language translation.
- A definition.
- A synonym or antonym.
- A historical person associated with an event.
- A scientific term matching a description.
- A mathematical formula.
- A spelling response after hearing or seeing a cue.
- An example using the displayed word.
- An explanation of why two ideas are connected.
The teacher is not limited to asking for the literal response stored in the activity. The displayed material can serve as a starting point for pronunciation, elaboration, comparison, or discussion.
Reclaiming Participation Online
Remote teaching often makes it too easy for students to become passive observers. A learner can enter the meeting, mute the microphone, and fade into the background.
No single technical feature can solve that problem. Participation depends on relationships, lesson design, appropriate expectations, and the teacher’s classroom presence.
A live call-on tool can nevertheless help.
It gives students a visible place in the activity. It lets the teacher know who has joined. It signals clearly when a student has been selected. It accommodates both spoken and typed participation. Most importantly, it creates the expectation that everybody should be considering the prompt because everybody remains part of the lesson.
The technology behind this feature includes live registration and rapid communication between student and teacher screens. But, as is often the case, the goal is not especially technological.
The goal is to let a teacher say, “All right, who is next?”—and have the online classroom respond.
Authorship note: This feature announcement was generated by artificial intelligence using samples of David Jones’s blog writing as a stylistic guide. It was reviewed for consistency with the current Innovation Assessments WordStudy Live Call-On feature.
