Hi John,
Sorry, I don't know how to get what you are asking for, but since I get the impression you are asking students to volunteer to answer a question, I do know of another possible way of asking questions where you don't need to worry about who "raised" their hand first. If possible, install and use the Realtime Quiz add-on. Also, when you upgrade to a Moodle 2.6 or higher, you can use Active Quiz. https://moodle.org/plugins/search.php?s=realtime+quiz&search=Search+plugins
The advantage of these two add-ons is that ALL students need to answer and can do so without anyone seeing or hearing their answer, which could cause them to be embarrassed.
HTH,
AL