I think some of my younger classes might benefit from spending more time with other students. Rather than have a plan I thought it might speed things up and avoid having students feel singled out if I could randomly generate a seating chart. I figured that, since I use a projector every class it would only be a short step to project this. I had a go at looking for a pre-existing app for this and there are a few but I couldn’t find anything free that would do the job.
In the end I used the list of names in Google spreadsheet and made a chart so that the list would be displayed pretty much as the room looks. These can then be shuffled by reordering the original sheet using a random number column. Not very fancy but it looks like it should do the job.
I guess a quick training session should be all that is needed. The questions that spring to mind are:
How often to use it? Change every class? Change every week? Allow choice seating some times?
Will report back here.
Moving Forward 