Some ideas for online icebreakers (Teams Calls, Zoom etc).

1) "Post a GIF Response" Ask students a question that can be answered with a GIF. For example "Post a GIF that describes your hopes and dreams" - Really fun way to enable a little creativity and humour. [1/n]

2) "Top Tips" Ask everyone in the meeting for their top tip around a common subject. For example "Post a tip for cooking your favourite dish" [2/n]

3) "The Cup Game" get three cups, put an object under one of them. Take a photo of your three upturned cups and ask "which has the object hidden". give your students a few seconds to place their bets (polling apps useful) then share a photo showing which cup it was. [3/n]

4) "Pass the story" Start by writing the first sentence of a short story eg "Mike went to the shop". Then, (in alphabetical order, get your students to type into the chat, the next sentence of the story. Fun procedural generation activity. [4/n]

5) "Hands Down". Ask everyone to put their virtual hands up, then ask questions to get them to put their hands down. EG "put your hand down if your birthday is in June". Keep going until online one person has their hands up. [5/n]

6) "Who am I" Get your students to email one interesting/unique/boring fact about themself ahead of the first session. Read them out one by one and get people get guess who the fact is about. (make sure you tell the students what the facts will be used for!) [6/n]

7) "Marching Words Proverb" In alphabetical order ask your students to type one word each to create a random proverb starting with a word that you provide.

e.g. Students...Who...Eat...Cheese...Dance...Erratically [7/n]

8) "Share a Photo" ask everyone to share a photo of something that brings them joy. Be prepared for many a kitten/puppy picture. [8/n]

9) "Would you rather" create a quick poll, around a would you rather question and ask your students to vote. A would you rather question, is one like this.

"Would you rather fight off a horse sized duck, or 100 duck sized horses" [9/n]

10) "Emoji Hyroglyphs" Describe some films, superheros, etc using just emojis and get your students to guess what you are describing. For example...

= Which superhero is this?
= What film is this?
= Which superhero is this?
= Which film is this?

11) "Group Playlist" Ask everyone in the group to contribute a song from YouTube to a group playlist. Get them to post the song in the chat, along with quick reasoning for why they included that song. (with thanks to @KaySocLearn)