Web 2.0 Classroom Ice Breakers

Sketchcast as a Class Ice Breaker
Visit the site and try it out at http://www.sketchcast.com
It reminds me of the Magic Drawing Board on Captain Kangeroo (back in the day).You might be saying, “That’s fine for high school students, but I teach adults”. Think it over. These are relaxing, non-threatening ways to help your students strengthen and master computer skills needed for online and blended courses. It, also, gives you a sneak peak at their computer skills before the class begins. It gives you an idea of their skills before they attempt to send you their midterm papers in the digital dropbox.

Text Cloud Ice Breaker:
Recently, I received a message from our colleague, Htay Hla, Director of Information Technology at University of Arizona. He put one of my posted journal articles through a tag cloud generator, Tag Crowd, http://www.tagcrowd.com. He sent the generated tag cloud to me in a pdf format. I thought, “AMAZING! Could this be a tool for the classroom?” I tried it. I put my CV through the Tag Crowd. Click on the link below. Look! It’s me, professionally compressed!

http://wozofcleveland.com/wozniak_tagcloud4small.jpg

Instead of your students posting an introduction on a dry, discussion board forum, have them take it one step further. Have them write a paragraph about themselves on the forum and put it through Tag Crowd. They can share their text cloud jpgs as an attachment to their forum post, or try a classroom group page on Flickr or Facebook. It doesn’t have to be an ice breaker. I see many uses for this free application in visual arts, economics, English composition, history, biology … you name it. There is no download. Try it. Let me know what you think. Thank you. Htay.

Please send me, or post a comment about, your own Web 2.0 ice breakers to share.