Icebreaker Ideas

     Icebreakers are great opportunities to get to know your students and for students to get to know their classmates. While the time it takes to facilitate these fun activities is usually sacrificed due to time constraints, having these non-academic conversations goes a long way. They give a chance for everyone to participate in, help build a positive classroom atmosphere, and are low-risk, informal ways to practice your classroom norms. Here are some icebreaker ideas with accompanying links:

1. Two Truths and a Lie

Write three statements about yourself - two of your statements should be true, and one should be made up. Be creative! Then, have them guess which statement is false and explain their choice. Check it out at this blog post!

2. Time to take a Selfie
Have students take a selfie and answer some questions about themselves on a Padlet wall, similar to how I did it with the 'Second Start' Padlet. To encourage learning about their classmates, have students play a trivia game with their classmates. Creating this trivia game will help you learn about your students too!

 Credit to Catlin Tucker

3. Who am I?

Give three clues to a person and have the classmates guess who or what the person is. If you do this during videoconferencing, have the student turn off their video camera and then reveal him/herself after their classmates guess. I did this during a professional development videoconference session around Halloween and it was a hit.

    If you are working with younger students, you can start with student-parent icebreakers. This inspires a dialogue between students with their parents. It also helps introduce parents to online space so they feel comfortable about the work being done online.

Build your classroom community. Do not be intimidated by digital natives.

    Who are the digital natives? Mark Prensky (2001) first introduced the terms of digital natives and digital immigrants to characterize the difference between students and teachers with technology. Many teachers are digital immigrants, "not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in [their] lives, become fascinated by and adopted many or most of the new technology." In contrast, "students today are all 'native speakers' of the digital language of computers, video games, and the Internet." They spend hours on social media and sending text messages, but few students realize how powerful their words are.

    It may be intimidating to teach using technology when our students are proficient users. But it is our responsibility to create a safe, online community that practices authentic and meaningful communication. It starts with us, the teachers, to create a clear set of guidelines for student interactions online, model appropriate behavior, and monitor the missteps that occur along the way. Here are some questions to reflect upon when creating the norms in your virtual classroom:

• What habits do you want to instill in your students in order to be successful learners?
• How should they interact with you and others in order to maintain learning conditions?
• What should students do with their learning?

    As you create your virtual classroom norms with the reflected answers above, keep these tips in mind:

• A fewer number of norms, rather than more, work better. The recommendation is about three to five. You can have a bold sentence to highlight the overarching norm and then write a few sentences afterward to clarify the norm (such as this here).
• Co-construct them with students. Have students take ownership of their class and behaviors. Students have a good sense of what is right and wrong, even the young ones.
• State them positively. Beware of norms that start with the word 'No' because these do not tell them what students should do.
• Post the norms. Just as we would have posters of our norms in a physical classroom, it is important to post them in a virtual space so that students are always aware of them.
• Teach and rehearse the expectations. The norms should be taught during the first weeks of school and revisited occasionally throughout the remainder of the year, especially after a school break. You should model each rule so that students can learn what they look and sound like.

    Stay tuned for my next blog post of ice-breakers ideas so that students can practice these norms!

 

My name is Kristen Harms.  I am one of the Virtual Developers for the 2020-2021 school year.  I came to Parkway just a few years ago to be the Instructional Coach at Highcroft Ridge 🌹.  Prior to that, I worked in Webster Groves School District teaching 4th grade and Kindergarten.  I was also the Elementary Social Studies Coordinator.  

I have two children in Parkway, at Barretts and South Middle.  I also have three stepchildren in Kirkwood School District.

I hope to be as much of a support as possible this school year.  

Please reach out at kharms@parkwayschools.net.

A 'Second Chance' to start over - What will you do differently?

Dear Virtual Campus teachers,

You have a unique opportunity here. You taught virtually during the first 9 weeks of distance learning and now you get to learn from your mistakes and re-do what went wrong within this school year. Let me emphasize - within this school year. One of the things I enjoy about teaching is that I get a chance to improve every year. But you do not have to wait a full year to start over, you get to do it now.

I get that it's frustrating - you have to save and import from Resources in Schoology. You have to learn about all of your new students and build that community again. But guess what? You have already survived your 'first year' of virtual teaching and you get to already do it differently with your 'second year.' And the year isn't even over! So my questions to you are: 

What did you learn from that first nine weeks of distance-learning?

Now that you are familiar with virtual teaching, what will you do differently with your new Virtual Campus class? 

It's easy to think about this in isolation. However, I challenge you to share your answers and intentions on this anonymous Padlet below.

Cheers,

Elegan

Welcome! Who am I?

Hi! My name is Elegan Kramer and I'm one of the virtual developers for the 2020-2021 school year. I'm here to help you, teachers, with your educational-technological needs and best practices. While challenging, think of this time as an opportunity to think differently about education. Be brave and try new things! We are here to help you brainstorm and implement new ideas.

As a way to get to know me as a person, let's play a game! Below are three statements - two of them are true and one is false. Which statement is false?

1. My son goes to the same Parkway elementary school that I went to.
2. I can do a strict pull-up.
3. I was born in Taipei, Taiwan.

Curious about the answer? Watch this video about me to find out! :)

Cheers,

Elegan

Welcome!

 Welcome to the Virtual Developer Blog

We will be updating this blog two times a week with topics that will support your teaching 

in Virtual Campus.

Our topics will include: Schoology, Google, Kami, Video Conferencing, Video Making, Instructional Strategies, and beyond.