Student-led creation of midterm study guide

I finished a lecture earlier than expected and had some time to spare, so I tried an activity I read about and had the students create their own study guide for the topic I just finished. Each student wrote his name on a piece of paper and then wrote one or two words to describe an important topic. The student then handed the paper to a classmate who wrote a different idea on the same sheet. They did this two more times and then returned the document to the original student. I then asked them for the ideas that were written on their papers and tallied the number of people who wrote each idea. We ended up with six or seven items on the white board, which I photographed and told them would be included in the study guide for the midterm.

Next time it would work better if I collected the papers by row and redistributed them for each item. This would reduce the confusion for those students who did not know where to send the papers. At the end, I would ask them to find the student whose name is on the paper, which would get them to talk and move around a bit.