Ice-Breaker Tuesday: Online ice-breaker activities

I love ice-breaker activities! One of my goals has been to complete an online ice-breaker activity every week! In fact, that's one of the goals that I aspire to! However, I know many people struggle with finding optimal ice-breaker assignments for online courses so I have dubbed the 2nd Tuesday of every month as Ice Breaker Tuesday!

Ice-breakers are activities that can be used to help students get to know each other. They are often used on the first day of classes by instructors to "lighten the mood" as well. Ice-breakers are very important in online courses because they are a great way of enhancing social presence. Social presence refers to the the ability of students to integrate themselves into an online environment and represent themselves authentically. As such, ice-breakers are well suited to enhance social presence.

As this is a special installation in The Online Educator blog, for today's blog post, I'll post several "go-to" resources I use for awesome online ice-breakers:

- 5 Creative Icebreaker Assignments for the Online Classroom

- Icebreakers for the college classroom from Faculty Focus

- Introductory activities from Equity/Unbound/OneHE

- 50 Ideas for Online Icebreakers- UNM Center for Educational Innovation

These should keep you busy, at least until the 2nd Tuesday of next month!

 What are your favorite online icebreakers? Share them in The Online Educator Facebook Group!