This activity could be used as a community-building exercise, or even possibly an icebreaker, where students get to share more about themselves, in a new and different way. It engages students' creative and critical thinking through story, allowing them to recognise the degree to which 'origin' stories shape our understanding of the world, ourselves, others, teaching, and learning, etc., and recognising that sometimes we must write our own.

This activity can be carried out at any point during an academic year and works well as a brainstorming or pre-writing activity. It encourages students to engage in different ways of seeing and experiencing things through metaphors. 

This activity is great for building community and discussing course content in a structured way.

This activity is a twist on the children's game 20 Questions for kids, in which a player reads clues one by one while the other players try to guess the person, place, or thing. This version is ideal for introducing a new topic in an educational setting. The instructor distributes the clues among the students who then interact with one another to exchange information and guess what the topic might be.

For students to collaborate, get creative, and produce something that helps them feel closer to one another.

This activity is great for helping students to get to know each other and keeping the class atmosphere fun and engaging.

Help students share something about themselves, musical tastes, while building community as they speak about their musical choices.

This activity promotes both teacher and student wellbeing throughout the whole semester (beginning, middle and end). It helps you and students to connect as human beings and communicate effectively.

Allow students to cooperate and solve problems. Originally created as a language-learning activity to help students learn verb conjugation in Arabic, Spanish, French, Italian, English etc, this activity can be adapted to teach discipline-specific content. For example, it can be used in social sciences by putting a picture on one side and a name or a definition on the other side. It can also be used in mathematics, where the result is on the side and the mathematical problem on the other side.

This is a fun and quirky activity to break the ice and get to know each other or a warm-up exercise that could set the tone for collaboration activities.

To build students’ confidence and oral presentation skills through light-hearted, improvised presentations using unexpected visual prompts.

Encourage short, focused storytelling, easy to share with others, writing stories in 100 words (or fewer), or 6 words or 2 sentences, etc.

Help students reflect on their exam/assessment performance in order to improve future performance in your course.

To help participants reflect on language experiences, sharing biographical information. This promotes inclusivity and empathy, while building transferable skills for collaboration and self-advocacy beyond the academic setting.

A great icebreaker for multicultural classrooms that celebrates linguistic diversity and creativity. It encourages students to share unique, untranslatable words from different languages, fostering cultural understanding, connection, and engaging conversations about language and meaning.

Help individuals visually their wellbeing and the level of satisfaction in their current circumstances. Identify imbalances or areas needing attention, and support goal-setting for greater overall wellbeing and personal growth.

To respect the dignity of each person by providing a slower, thicker, and more deliberate opportunity for everyone to introduce themselves.

Help students develop metacognitive learning strategies, which refer to the ability to think about one's own thinking processes. By engaging in metacognitive activities, students can become more aware of their own learning processes, monitor their own progress, and ultimately become more independent and effective learners.

Encourage students to look at what's working and what can be changed in a constructive manner that can lead to action.

The purpose of the Pass the Paper activity is to provide participants with an opportunity to connect synchronously through writing rather than speaking, whether in a face-to-face or online environment.

Encourage student wellbeing through a simple gratitude practice that fosters reflection, joy, and radical self-compassion. Flexible for use throughout the term, it helps build emotional awareness and a positive mindset.

The 15% Solution is a fun and creative way to solve problems with a group of students (or teachers). It encourages people to work together as a team and use everyone's different ideas and perspectives to come up with the best solution. View the original activity.

Capturing student learning or for use as a cool-down activity at the end of a class. It can be adopted to check students’ understanding after they have finished a reading, video or module.

To help groups identify elements of success.

Get students used to supporting each other and helping each other without always turning to an expert or teacher to solve problems; also useful for quick problem-solving.

This video was a recorded interview where Dave Cormier asked Maha Bali to give a recommendation for online learning during the pivot to emergency remote teaching during Covid-19.

Creating semi-formal, semi-synchronous spaces outside of formal class time for students to socialize with each other (and the teacher where possible) to address the socioemotional needs of students.

To invite students to use their bodies to represent, collaboratively, an image of something that is worth discussing, and then use the resulting 'tableau' combined as a source of critical reflection, and then invite participants to make changes to make the image different (e.g. if it is an oppressive situation, how can we make small modifications to make it more liberating?)

This activity uses creative, low-pressure portrait drawing to help students introduce themselves, build community, and overcome the fear of perfection. It encourages playful expression, supports diverse ways of knowing and creating, and sets a tone of experimentation - especially useful when launching creative projects or collaborative work.

Bring in external speakers into your classroom via a 'studio visit', an informal discussion with one or two external guests. Visits can take place in person or virtually, depending on what works best for your context.

This is a pair or trio activity which is ideal for reflection and also to practice focused listening. Structured dialogues can work well with teens and adults in a variety of learning contexts or communities.

Encourages students think critically about a given topic. This activity can work well as a reflective activity where students are encouraged to reflect on their learning experiences and identify what they consider to be the most challenging or frustrating aspects of a course.

Daily Creates (also sometimes know as 'Daily Digital Alchemy' or #DDAs in the context of #NetNarr) is creative challenge posted every day. It provides a space for regular, low-stakes practice of spontaneous creativity through mini creative challenges. This activity encourages students to develop creative confidence, express ideas playfully, and engage in community-building in an inclusive, flexible way.

Develop strategies for operating in a range of plausible yet unpredictable futures.

To create a space where all students can engage in open, respectful, and meaningful conversations about complex or challenging topics. Conversation Café helps participants make sense of difficult issues, build trust, and gain insight into different perspectives through structured rounds of listening and sharing.

Promote a sense of community and break the ice in class with collaborative storytelling activities.

This activity helps students build key research and writing skills - close reading, summarising, paraphrasing, and citation - while collaborating on a shared literature review matrix. It supports preparation for class discussions or literature reviews by encouraging synthesis across sources and peer learning.

Annotation is the addition of a note to a text. Syllabi are important texts in the lives of educators and learners. Yet a syllabus is an educator's draft vision of teaching yet enacted, a preamble to learning yet accomplished. To help learners read, make sense of, question, and discuss their course and learning, invite learners to annotate the syllabus. This activity is appropriate for online, hybrid, and face-to-face courses. This activity can occur both synchronously and asynchronously depending on the format of the course syllabus and the technology used for annotation. This activity is an informal, low-stakes means for students to connect with one another through their discussion of an important text - the syllabus.