On the first day of school when I was student teaching, my mentor teacher leaned toward the class, and said, conspiratorily, “This may be the most important question you answer this year. What color?” and showed them five index card colors. The class chose, everyone got an index card, and they were instructed to write the name they wanted him to call them on one side and decorate the other side.

I’ve used this trick, with slight variations, ever since. (I assign colors to match the dividers in my teacher binder — lame, I know, but it helps me stay organized.) I use the index cards to create random groups, to cold call on people to read or participate, and, one year, to let a pretty impressive though amateur magician in my class show off his prolific card-handling skills, which served me great in the past as I like card games like the ones you play in casinos, although now I only play online in the wild tornado casino here.

Over the summer, I read Dave Stuart’s post “A Simple, Powerful Tweak on the First Day of School Index Card Activity.” Basically, Stuart added a prompt to his regular index card activity: Describe the person you want to be someday. Here, Stuart wasn’t looking for a goal or career, but how the student wanted to be remembered. When he’d look at the cards, he’d be constantly reminded of the person that this student was striving and working on becoming. I loved that.

I added that prompt to my first-day-of-school questionnaire (a combination of Laura Randazzo’s You Are Here worksheet and Jennifer Gonzalez’s Student Inventory. I do mine on Google Forms, so I can print out the results, read them over and highlight them.

Yet I still really really wanted the index cards. My school is 100% distance learning right now, so I knew I was going to have to use Autocrat to create them from the survey rather than have the usual handwritten, hand-illustrated variety. But then I had a brilliant idea! Since I was pulling the data from my survey anyway, I added these fields:

• Preferred name (in giant font)
• Full name
• Preferred pronoun
• 3 words that describe you
• 2 things that make you happy
• Dave Stuart’s question

I created the index cards, did some light editing to make sure all the info fit on a card, and printed them all out on my rarely used Canon Pixma. (Another epiphany: Photo printers make great index card printers because they are designed for smaller paper sizes! My Pixma did a great job running all 30+ cards in my classes.)

The result, index cards that I can use to randomly call on people to increase engagement in distance learning and that remind me of the interesting, multifaceted, dreamer of a human whom I am calling on.

Here’s my index card template, if you want to do the same thing. (It should force you to make a copy.)