When you're doing a virtual classroom one of the challenges you can have is warming up your learners and making sure that they all feel as if they are sharing the learning experience.
It's vitally important to get this right - it's likely that at some point during the session you'll want learners to interact with each other. Learners need to feel as if they are in a safe space for this to work effectively.
There are many approaches you can use and I daresay you have some great approaches up your sleeve - but let's face it - it's always useful to pick up new ideas.
I've got 2 I like to use. I confess that neither of them are original ideas from me - I found them online - I'm afraid I can't credit the ideas to the original thinkers as I've been using them for so long I wouldn't know where to start looking. That said, I'll now provide more detail.
Getting teams to work together - in a light hearted way
The first icebreaker is where you have people that are reasonably familiar with each other and breakout rooms.
Break the audience into 2 teams (or more if necessary), each team is either 'dragon' or 'unicorn'. In their breakout room the team prepare an argument for why their mystical creature would make the best pet.
Each team comes back to the main room and a representative for the team puts the case forward. The facilitator decides on the winner. From past experience this can get quite heated, but is also a lot of fun.
Sharing more about yourself in a safe environment
The other that can work well for new teams is if you provide a PowerPoint with a number of different images. Selecting only from those images provided each person uses them to illustrate as they share 'about me', 'how I work', 'what I bring to the team', 'what I hope to get from this project/training'.
Because people can pre-plan they can decide how much they want to share and also the tone of their presentation.
I hope those are useful, even if they are not perfect for your audience they may create an outline for a more suitable approach. It would be great if you could add your ideas to the comments.
Photo TheDigitalArtist on Pixabay
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