Virtual Icebreakers for online learning

When learning online or remotely, it is so important to have some fun with the students. It can be a lonely and stressful place to be learning from home, without the face to face interaction of fellow students and teachers in the classroom.

Some of these resources were suggested by members of the Global Educator Collective facebook group and others were responses to a question asked in the ISTE Connects Community discussions re suggestions for icebreakers for online learning. There are some fun and engaging activities for remote learning and also to use back in the classroom.

 

A fantastic list from Torey Trust on Virtual community building for high school, college and graduate students.

From Rachel Dene Poth: I have done  a lot of different ice breakers. Some of the more recent ones involved using Buncee and the many templates available to create About Me, 3 truths and a lie, things I wish my teacher knew, fun facts about me, and many more. Students create and share.  Also using Flipgrid for doing introductions or responding to prompts. With Zoom, perhaps using breakout rooms and having each room do an activity to get to know the others in the room.

Laurie Guyon: I’d use BingoBaker to create the Bingo cards and play virtually.  I have used Nearpod for games as well.  I often will put a draw it slides in as the first slide so that participants have something to do while they are waiting for everyone to join. The draw it could be a word search, a complete the picture, or a drawing game.  I also sometimes use a Collaborate board where you ask them to find a GIF about something, a quick intro, or even guess something.  It’s great to get them engaged right away!

Jackie Gerstein Virtual Team Building Activities 

Jennifer Smith: I generally try to connect my ice breaker activities to the content I will be teaching. I ask students to share the name of their favorite scientist or an example of how they used science that day/week. Pets make regular appearances in class meetings, so having students introduce their pet may be helpful. Students who do not have a pet could describe a pet they would like to have. With older groups of students I have asked them to share their most commonly used emoji or to share the song that best represents how their week has gone.

• Back to School Bingo
• Ideas from the Flipgrid Community
• Family Feud Style Game
• Fun Activities for Class Zoom meetings
• Ideas for icebreaker questions Big Talk 

 

 

 

Fun, engaging remote learning lesson

One rather fun and engaging remote learning lesson involved students guessing which song was a teacher’s favourite. I also tried this with a hybrid class at year 9/10 level. This meant that half my class was face to face at school and half were still learning from home.

Preparation:-

1. I sent out a request via MS Teams in the Staff Team chat asking teachers for their favourite songs. Approximately 12 replied. Some were great and shared the actual youtube link to music clip.
2. A table in Word showed the teacher name, song title and youtube link. (It would probably have been easier if I had put the links on a blog post on my class blog)
3. Setup 2 more Word documents – one for students with the Teacher name in one column and the a heading for the song title. This was shared with students via the chat feature so that they could add the teacher’s name upon hearing the song. Another word document was for my use with the links to the songs. As I shared my screen I couldnt use the one with the answers on)
4.  Setup the live meeting with Meet Now in MS Teams when it was class time. The word document was shared in the chat. I briefly explained what we were doing.
5. Then I shared my screen. Make sure you check “Share system audio” so that students can hear the music remotely. See image below
   
6. I worked my way through the youtube clips, played the clips for about 30-60 seconds, with students typing up the teacher whose favourite song they thought it was.
7. After each group of 5 or 6 songs, we went through the answers.
8. In the next class, students wanted to share and guess each other’s favourite songs.
9. The sent the youtube link to their favourite song to me in the chat.
10.  I played them through to ensure that they were ok and then set up similar word documents. Except this time I added the links to my blog which was much easier to quickly access the clips in real time.  See this blog post COVID19 and scroll down till you see the links to the songs that were favourites for some of my year 9/10 students.

I was pleasantly surprised with their music choices and only one student had shared an inappropriate one, which I censored prior to the class.

Summary: Students really engaged with this activity and wanted more. There was no real lag from me playing the song clip over Teams to them listening to it. For those students who had trouble with internet access, they could be given the sheet with the song links and teachers names on and do it in their own time, when internet access was stronger.