Last week I got an interesting question from a reader named Chuck. I’m not sure that my answer or the question has broad appeal, but I found it interesting so I made a video about it. Chuck’s question was as follows:

I have been struggling to find a tool that I can use to do Philosophical Chairs in a virtual classroom. The discussion/debate part is no problem, what I need is a tool where students can move an avatar or a picture of themselves to a certain area of the screen to indicate their position on a topic. All students need to see the same screen but the only item they can move is their avatar/picture and nobody else’s. If you know Philosophical Chairs then you will immediately see what I am talking about. Do you have any ideas for a tool or a platform that could do this?

I didn’t know of a tool that was made specifically for hosting online philosophical chairs activities, but I did think that using Google’s Jamboard is one possible solution.

It’s important to note that Jamboard won’t prevent a student from moving a classmate’s avatar so this is a solution that will only work if you can get your kids to respect the rules of the activity. If that’s a problem for your students then you might want to try using Padlet as suggested by Rushton Hurley in our latest episode of Two Ed Tech Guys Take Questions & Share Cool Stuff.