Summary:
What Can an Ice Breaker Exercise Achieve?
- Test video/audio capability
- Introduce course content
- Exhibit what past knowledge a student is bringing
- Identify the questions that students hope to find answers for
- Help build the learning community to help them feel more connected
- Set the tone for the class
- Class introductions
Introductory Activity Brainstorm:
- Change your user-name to reflect your content you would like explore
- Discussion post
- Recipe card with drawing
- Post a photo and small sentence describing an important place for their teaching and learning
- Zoom annotations
- Can create a scale to check where people are sitting
- One word answers for the chat
- Snowball – give someone a private message
- Give food product to groups to explore the history
- Students can summarize it on powerpoint
- Use of breakout rooms
- Fill out a form/questionnaire
Teaching style refers to
actions and contributions
of the teacher in the classroom that students
may intuitively respond to
Teacher Presence:
Divided into 3 categories by Vaughan et al (2013) – Teaching in Blended Learning Environments:
| Design & Organization | Facilitation | Direct Instruction |
| “Setting curriculum & methods”Simple to navigate course Easy to use tools, technology and activities … | “Shaping constructive exchange”Starting discussionsIntroducing comments on discussions to build more critical discourse or bring in a different idea Encouraging student-to-student or student-to-content engagement… | “Focusing and resolving issues”Lecturing via synchronous or asynchronous videoAuthored content (even on a Canvas page)Audio clipsFeedback … |
The importance of Audio Quality
Connect with The Learning Centre to make sure that you have the right technology and that it is set-up and functioning properly.
Establishing a Communication Policy:
Tags: best-practices