Student Engagement in the time of Covid 19

The biggest roadblock to learning in this time of COVID is engagement. People posting on my page have told of situations where there is little participation between student and teacher. Situations where they can hear the teacher telling the class that they know there are more than two or three students in the room. My wife can attest to the last statement as she hears me loudly talking to my computer with no response. Do we just chalk it up to this is the situation and this is the best we can do? I just can't do that no matter how hard I try. As teachers, engagement is the most important thing we do. Engage a student in the content and they are on their way to understanding. If you think this will not happen with your most struggling student, give it a try! Between the interactive techbook our county uses and activities from Desmos, my goal in the last few weeks has been to move in this more interactive direction. It is a lot of managing to watch students progress in a summary and provide feedback and direction at the same time. In the physical classroom, students could gather in small groups and help each other. Now everyone is working on their own and the only link between all of us is the chat where students constantly are asking for help but also can share their successes. It is by no means perfect, but if you are a teacher you know that euphoric feeling inside when students are engaging in the learning. Yesterday as we were working on graphing points from two similar money-making opportunities when a student shared that if we connected the dots and the two segments we had made we would have a parallelogram. See the attached pictures! This is the student who multiple times every day tells me how he doesn't understand. His observation blew my mind and I told him so. Suddenly he knew all the answers! All he needed was to realize he had some great insights into math!!