Icebreakers

Peer Interviews - Give students 10 minutes on the first day of class to work in pairs and interview one another. Depending on your context and your students, you might want to give them some guidance on topics to cover (e.g., name, interests, major, course expectations, career goals, etc.). Alternatively, you can just give them time to get to know someone new. Depending on class size, you can invite students to introduce their peers (all or a sample of students if the class is very large).
One Minute Paper - One Minute Paper is a quick, adaptable strategy that can be used in several areas of instruction. In this context, you can use the One Minute Paper to find out about your students and ascertain why they are taking your course and what they expect to learn. Either on paper or on a 3x5 index card, ask your students to take One Minute or so to respond to a few prompts related to goals and expectations for the course. After they finish their response, have them turn to a peer and share their ideas for a few minutes. You can invite contributions from the class, which will likely lead to good discussions and questions about the course structure, objectives and assignments. If you are taking a power sharing approach in your class, this activity will open the dialogue for negotiation about the course plan. Finally, you can collect these responses so that you can reflect and revisit your course design and consider elements you might wish to add, remove or tweak.
Find Someone Who... - This is a nice activity to get students out of their seats to meet others in the course. On a handout entitled Find Someone Who ..., you will have a list of around 20 or so phrases to complete the sentence. For example, Find Someone Who ... has traveled to France; has worked for the US government; has worked in a clinical setting; has had managerial experience; speaks multiple languages; likes taking online courses, rock climbs, etc. You can craft these statements to target students' personalities and interests or you can address the course content and students' background experiences related to the discipline. For each line, they should get a signature from someone who can respond 'yes'. Tell them they can only sign one time on each page so they are encouraged to meet as many people as there are line items (and likely more!).
Happy Hour - Similar to Find Someone Who..., Happy Hour gets students up and talking to one another. Prior to class, prepare strips of paper - each with one question or discussion prompt - to distribute to your students. Then give students 10-15 minutes for the activity. The objective is for each student to approach another student and ask the question on his or her strip. After each both asks and responds to their respective questions, they should swap papers and find another student to ask. They'll continue to walk around and interact with as many people as they can until time is up. As with Find Someone Who... you can have the prompts be fun or content specific - depending on your objective for the activity. Either way, this will break the ice on day one and give them a chance to make connections. *Adaptation: Ask the students to tear a strip of paper and write their own questions within a theme you set (e.g., about course expectations, about general life experiences and interests). This saves you having to cut and distribute the papers. They will still pass their question on to another student so they will be exposed to many questions and ideas generated by their peers.
Two Truths and a Lie - This familiar icebreaker can be used in various contexts from camp to the university classroom. Have each student write three statements about themselves on a piece of paper - two should be TRUE and one should be FALSE. Depending on the size of your class, you can execute this icebreaker in a couple of ways. In a class with 50 or so students you might have them share their statements with a peer first, then ask folks to volunteer the ones that were the most shocking, funny, tricky, etc. Alternatively, in a very large class, you might have them get into groups of 5-6 and let them go around and make guesses about one another then invite a couple to share when the whole class comes back together. This activity usually provides a laugh in addition to very interesting personal information that can lead to unanticipated connections. For example, two students might discover they've both traveled to the same village in Kenya or that they are both the mothers of identical twins. You never know!
Online Introductions - Another option for classes of any size is to ask students to write an introduction to themselves (1-2 paragraphs) and post the intros in the learning management system for the course (e.g., CANVAS, Blackboard, Moodle). As an incentive to promote community building, you might make this an assignment and offer credit for both posting the introduction and responding to a set number of peers in the class. You can also give students the option to post a video introduction.

Don't forget to introduce yourself! There is really no reason that you couldn't take part in any of the above icebreaker activities and you'll learn a lot about your students in the process.