During the first days of school, students get sorted into classrooms full of peers who they may or may not know well. Because of this, they might find themselves in settings where they’re not entirely comfortable, at least at first.
To remedy this, teachers often facilitate icebreaker activities—fun and interactive strategies for helping students get to know each other.
These mixers can be very beneficial. They help students become more comfortable with their classmates as well as with their teacher. The activities are structured, so they take some of the pressure off students and provide a safe space for them to share something about themselves while learning about others.
Icebreakers can increase peer empathy by helping classmates gain a better understanding of one another. These activities can also be gateways for students to make connections with one another that can develop into lasting friendships. They can offer you, the teacher, valuable insights into the needs of your students and help to inform how you design learning experiences.
Even after you’ve met your students and begun the school year, it’s not too late to think about integrating icebreakers into your classroom experiences. While icebreakers can be, and often are, offline activities, there are also ample opportunities to design these digitally.
Some of the digital versions use the technology to design or create the activity, while the sharing happens offline or face-to-face. Others involve sharing that occurs in a digital space. Both types of interactions are valuable, and you’ll probably want at least some of the interactions to be face-to-face.
Even when the initial interaction is digital, it can be helpful to structure a follow-up activity that brings students into face-to-face conversations with each other. These are great opportunities to help students develop their interpersonal skills in settings that do not involve online social media dynamics.
The following is a list of 13 digital icebreaker strategies that you might consider using in your classroom:
If you have a learning management system (LMS), you probably have access to an online discussion board. This is a great place to have students begin engaging with one another. Offer them a prompt that asks students to share something about themselves. For older students, you can leave this a little more wide open, such as: “Tell your classmates a little bit about yourself.”
For younger students, you’ll want to be more specific and scripted, to help guide them in their sharing. You might ask specific questions, like, “What is your favorite thing to do in the summer?” or “If you could learn about one thing, what would it be?”
For any activity where students are sharing about themselves and perhaps being vulnerable, it’s important to set expectations with the class for how to respond to others and how to be supportive and respectful. An ounce of prevention before you begin can head off a lot of student heartache later.
In this classic activity, students create either individual slides about themselves or maybe even an entire slideshow. If you’re having students design one slide, you could potentially have all of your students working off of one collaborative template. For full slideshows, students can either create their own file or work from a template that you provide.
For younger students, you might even have placeholders built into the slide template for them to simply fill out. With older students, you can provide more creative freedom, but you still might want to outline some parameters. If students are each creating their own slideshow—perhaps to present later—be sure to have a system for how they will submit or share that with you.
These artifacts are generally facilitated with some sort of template that can either be printed or completed digitally. At AVID Open Access, you can find free digital templates for both virtual lockers and pennants.
For the locker template, students decorate a virtual locker in a way that represents their interests and personality. They can do the same thing with the pennant or find another approach to designing a pennant that represents them as a classmate.
These activities not only let students express who they are to their classmates, but they also encourage creativity and problem-solving.
For this activity, students begin by completing a digital survey that you create. This survey should help you collect interesting information about each student. Then, you will take that survey information and create a flashcard packet using the free online website Quizlet. Be sure to include at least one card about every student.
Then, use Quizlet Live to turn those flashcards into a collaborative competition game, where students need to work together in groups to figure out which classmate is being described. It’s a fun and engaging way for students to both learn about each other and be introduced to a collaborative problem-solving environment. Students can build rapport by working together to solve the challenge.
This activity works really well in small groups. You create a list of six sharing prompts, one for each number on a die. Prompts might include things like, “Share a favorite hobby,” “Describe your family,” or “Share a dream that you have.” You might consider having two options for each number, so students have a choice if they end up with a prompt that makes them feel uncomfortable.
Then, students take turns rolling a die and responding to the corresponding prompt. You can use real dice or virtual ones. If you’re looking for virtual dice, we’ve got some available at AVID Open Access. Virtual dice can be conveniently embedded into a slideshow or LMS, which is very handy.
This classic activity can be done with full classes or small groups. You share a series of options between two contrasting choices in a “Would you rather?” format, and then students select the option they prefer. If you’re doing this with a full group, you can have students physically move to one side of the classroom or another to represent their choices.
If you’re conducting it virtually, you can use interactive polling software, like Mentimeter. Students respond with their devices and see the results on the screen in the front of the room. We have some “Would You Rather?” prompts on AVID Open Access if you’re looking for ideas to get you started.
This activity is digital, at least at first. You create a Padlet for the class to interact with, and students then individually go in and add to it. You might decide to leave the instructions fairly open-ended, such as, “Post works, images, and videos to the Padlet that represent who you are and that will help your classmates get to know you better.” Because Padlet allows for a wide variety of media types, students will have voice and choice in how they want to represent themselves.
To make sure that students engage with each other, you might want to create some sort of follow-up activity, such as having students find at least one interesting fact about each classmate. Since the idea is for students to learn about one another, you’ll need some sort of structure to make sure that they look through their peers’ posts.
For this one, you’ll create a BINGO card using a digital tool, like Google Docs or Microsoft Word. Then, print out the card for your students to use in a face-to-face activity. The BINGO card should be filled with descriptors that might match a classmate. These could include such things as: “owns a bike,” “has a sister,” “loves to draw,” “has been stung by a bee,” “likes to go to the beach,” and so on.
In the classroom, have students mingle with their classmates, getting others to sign a square on the BINGO card that describes them. It’s a good idea to limit each person to three signatures, to encourage students to continue mingling with others.
You can create your own card if you’d like, or you can use our BINGO card template on AVID Open Access. Students have fun with this, and it’s also encouraging if you play along so that your students can get to know you, too.
This is a little bit like the presentation option, but instead of using a slideshow, students create a digital book about themselves or add a page about themselves to a class book. Book Creator is a good option for this since it’s collaborative and allows students to include text, images, video, audio, and links. The open-ended nature of it allows students to be creative in how they express themselves to their classmates.
This activity works best in small groups. You give students a digital T-shirt template, and they collaboratively design a T-shirt that represents the members of their group.
While this can be done with a printed version, the digital option provides students with a few additional opportunities, such as inserting color images and even videos and audio, if you use a slides template. The activity not only forces students to work collaboratively, but they also learn about each other in the process.
This is similar to the T-Shirt design challenge, but instead of designing an open-ended T-shirt, students create a trading card that represents who they are. This one probably works better individually, with each student creating their own card.
You can begin with a template or let students design something from scratch. The younger the student, the more helpful a template will be. There are free trading card generators available online, such as ReadWriteThink, or you can create a template with a tool like Google Slides or Microsoft PowerPoint.
This is another activity that works best as a group mixer. For this one, challenge students to come up with a group theme song. You can add parameters to this if you’d like to guide it a bit, maybe giving students several things that they need to include in the tune. Then, you can have them perform this for the class in person, or you can go digital and have them use an online recording tool to record the song.
There are many free audio recording tools available online or for download, such as Audacity, Vocaroo, Online Voice Recorder, Kapwing, and GarageBand (for Apple users). Some even provide loops and samples that allow students to add beats or music to their production.
For this activity, you’ll have your students go to the Flippity website. It’s free and offers a wide collection of templates. The option you’ll want for this activity is called Virtual Breakout. It features a series of locks that students need to open by providing the correct answer to some questions.
To use this as a mixer, have each student complete their own version about themselves and then share it with their classmates. Students could team up to work on the challenges or try them on their own. They offer a fun and engaging way to learn about each other.
These are certainly not the only options but will hopefully aid in getting you thinking about what might work in your classroom. While these are especially beneficial at the beginning of the school year, don’t limit yourself to the first few weeks. Mixers are helpful all throughout the year, as they can support the deepening of relationships among your students and help them better understand each other. They’re great as both full-class activities or as an icebreaker for a group project. Have fun mixing it up!
AVID Connections
This resource connects with the following components of the AVID College and Career Readiness Framework:
- Instruction
- Culture
- Relational Capacity
- Break Down Barriers
Extend Your Learning
- 100 Back to School Ideas and Activities (Ditch That Textbook)
- 13 Fail-Safe Icebreakers to Use in Class Today (Erin Walton via EF)
- 42 Icebreakers for High School Students That Really Work (We Are Teachers)