Elke's E-Learning Journey

My first blog ever, originally for the LearnScope 2006 project, and which is now the sometime record of my journey into learning about and implementing an elearning strategy for my training organisation

Monday, August 07, 2006

ice breakers for a new online group

Thankyou to this newsletter:

GOG News issue 5 now availableby Kerrie Smith - Friday, 4 August 2006, 04:40 PM

Please visit GOG for the new newsletter: http://www.groups.edna.edu.au/course/view.php?id=270

5. Ice Breakers for Your Group
Getting people to feel comfortable with a group and with their new online life is assisted by providing simple tasks for them to do and activities for them to participate in.
Many groups begin with asking their members to look at their Group Profile and to edit it with some information about themselves, including a photograph or an image.
If you use the People block, then participants can check on who else is in the group and the photographs do help in reinforcing that sense of a virtual community of 'real' people
I often use a simple but somewhat silly poll called Favourite Fruit? You will see an example of this in EdNA's Training Space. I don't always use the bowl of fruit image. http://www.groups.edna.edu.au/mod/choice/view.php?id=9446
You might like to set up a chat as one of your early activities. The agenda could be to talk about the purpose of the group and for the participants to introduce themselves. It will help if they have done their Group Profile activity before that. For those who can't be present at the chat you can set it up so there is a log which everyone can access.
Another good group activity is a glossary: Terminology and Acronym Buster. Set up a glossary and encourage participants to add terms and acronyms. There is an example in EdNA's Training Space at http://www.groups.edna.edu.au/course/view.php?id=270Get participants to add a concept (word or acronym), identify some synonymns (key words) and then add a description. Whenever this term appears in your group site, the definition will be available through a popup system.

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