Source: Guidebook for Student Centered Classroom Discussions
Typical teacher-student discourse resembles a quiz show, with teachers asking a question, the student replying, and the teacher evaluating the student's response. The author of this article suggests that teachers direct their attention to modeling inquiry, emphasizing divergent over convergent questions, organizing students' approach to question-asking and -answering, listening, and providing authentic follow-up questions.
This online discussion tool allows a teacher to post a topic for discussion (could be student-generated) to a discussion “grid” which is simply an online space for collaborative thought. Students then respond to the topic by recording their thoughts in short video clips. Then, students can watch the videos of their classmates and respond back to them, generating further discussion. Students can share research, ask questions, and have time to think and respond in-depth too each others’ thoughts.
This is a free option if you have an LMS platform such as Google Classroom, Edmodo, or even Seesaw that supports student video upload and threaded discussion.
Have students record their thoughts in response to a prompt by creating a Vocaroo voice comment or by creating a screencast video. Your prompt could be a statement, word, question, startling statistic, text/excerpt, quotation, image, video, infographic, personal story. The mp3 or mp4 file could then be uploaded to your platform of choice where students could watch the videos and respond to each other.
Source: https://lindsayannlearning.com/7-free-online-discussion-tools/