5 Gripping Virtual Ice Breakers For Online Training Sessions

16th July 2021

Skilled and professional corporate trainers always look for interesting ice-breakers to make their webinars more collaborative, even before the COVID-19 outbreak. Icebreakers are an imperative part of any training program. These encourage learners to take part in sessions from the start. Though there are several ice-breakers that we can do in face-to-face training sessions but sometimes, getting virtual ice-breakers for online training sessions is quite challenging.

Invite your learners to check-in 10-15 minutes prior informally to the start of a session or you may ask them to stay on for a few minutes later to talk if they can. Executing an ice-breaker can be done in numerous ways depending on the extent of your group.

Excellent Virtual Ice-breakers

Here we have put together remarkable online ice-breakers specifically designed to set the tone for the rest of your session!

1. Table Topics

You will need a set of cards which you can find for sale online easily. You may type some of the questions from the card on a chat board and ask participants to write down their feelings. Or you could separate your learners into breakout rooms and assign each group one or two questions so that each individual in the group can answer. You can use online whiteboards and chats apart from breakout rooms if you want.

Table topics are a great way to start a conversation or get to know each other. You may include questions like – who do you trust and why, what are your thoughts of being wealthy and why, how would you describe your future in three words…and so on.

2. Two Truths, One Lie

As the name suggests, the basic idea of this ice-breaker is to make three declarations, two being true and one being a lie. Other participants will identify which statement is the lie among the statements. Announce the activity to your learners and tell them the instructions. Give them a few minutes to think of their answers. Have them disclose their two truths and a lie one partaker at a time. Your participants can say and respond to the statements verbally through their webcams or they can type their statements in the chat feature. The person who manages to properly guess the most gets successes.

This has been a classic icebreaker and it’s a nice activity for very early in any training or teaching sessions. Online tools you can use here are - Poll Everywhere, Google Forms and Survey Monkey.

3. Murder Mystery

Murder Mystery online is a very popular 30-minute game to advance communication skills, team building, problem-solving, leadership, and more. Send one or more of the 27 clues to each learner and challenge them to find the murderer, victim, time and place of the murder, and reason in 15 minutes — without writing anything down and using only verbal communication. If you have a large group of learners, you can use online breakout rooms. After each team plays, they can pick a representative to share their team’s involvement with the rest of the group.

4. Abstract Analysis

It is a great way to disclose the way your applicants contemplate and who thinks correspondingly. Gather a list of concepts or photos, it depends on you. Disclose the impressions or photos one by one, for each impression or photo, ask applicants what first comes to mind when they perceive them. Ask your learners to type their responses in the chat feature. Discuss the similar and different responses. It can be stimulating to realize who came up with the same or different views!

5. Hope and Fears

Ask learners to write down their utmost hope for example, for the session and then their greatest fear. While delivering training sessions online, you need to find additional ways to differentiate them. Read all the hopes first and then the fears and discuss. Online tools you can use are whiteboard, chat board, other teamwork tools such as Padlet or Lino.

We hope you found these online training icebreaker ideas helpful! The corporate trainer certification programs online prepare you to deliver training sessions more effectively and successfully. Virtual ice-breakers are a wonderful way to formulate your participants for the approaching information in your training session.

Written By : Park Jin Ae