Are you struggling to keep your students excited about online learning, and are looking for ways to increase student engagement online? Maybe you’re fully remote. Or your school went virtual for a little while.

Maybe you’re even in person and you’re looking for anything to engage your kids!

Below, I’ll give you my top 10 ways to increase your student engagement online.

Online Learning

When I fully commit to posting on this website, a lot of my content has to do with online learning. That’s because I am a full time virtual teacher.

During the 2020-2021 school year, my K-8 school went virtual for the entire year, and honestly I thrived. I created a YouTube channel called Detroit PE with over 170 virtual games to keep your kids active, and I was constantly looking for ways to keep the kids having fun.

As the PE teacher we have to live up to our secondary title “the fun teacher”. We are constantly trying to create FUN content, and I tried my absolute best to increase my student engagement online. Even if you don’t teach PE, these strategies can still be done by ANY teacher! Below are some of my best strategies that actually work for me.

Online Engagement Strategies:

1. Blind 10

I saw this on TikTok and for the life of me cannot find the original creator (if you know who it is, please let me know so I can give credit).

Anyways this game is so much fun for the kids. My 7th graders ask to play it all the time!

The objective is to get your group to count to ten without 2 people saying the same number.

Example:

• I say 1.
• Student A says 2.
• Student B says 3 and so on.
• But if student A and B both say 6 we start back at 1.

The only rule I make is that one student cannot say two numbers in a row. If Student A says 1 they cannot say 2.

Once you walk your students through a game let them take over and enjoy!

2. Breakout Room Shuffle

Breakout rooms should be where students collaborate, but they can be used for games too. Breakout rooms shuffle is where you put kids into designated rooms, and then once a minute or two has gone by, you shuffle their rooms up and they wind up in another breakout room with new classmates.

The trick to this is to NOT set the breakout room timer. You’ll keep track in the main meet of how much time has passed, and when you want to shuffle them click “breakout rooms” and then hit the shuffle button. Hit “save” and watch them join new rooms on whatever surveillance platform your school uses.

This keeps kids excited to see who they will run into in their different rooms.

One way to utilize this would be to give them a prompt they have to answer in the main meet. It could be content related, or something fun to wake them up and get them talking about themselves. When you shuffle them around, they’ll constantly be talking to different people, and they will not return to the main meet until you pull them all back.

Another fun way to do this is to play Blind 10 above. Start out by making their rooms smaller (more breakout rooms) so they have a decent shot to get to 10. But every couple minutes, take away a room while still shuffling, forcing their rooms to get larger and the game more challenging. I promise you will get kids coming back laughing and wanting to tell you all about their rooms.

There are so many different ways breakout room shuffles can be used, but I promise it’s a great way to increase student engagement online.

3. Double Double This That

This is an old game we used to play in elementary school, but it will work with any age. Below you can see how it’s played. The objective is to start slow, then see how fast you can do it!

I have more brain breaks on my on my TikTok at Detroit PE.

4. Social Minutes

This is one of my favorites. Every Monday every class I have spends 10-15 minutes socializing with their classmates. Since we are virtual and missing that physical aspect of in-person school, I try to make up for it with what I call Social Minutes.

I do this differently every week, but a lot of the times we are in breakout rooms. I will list below some of the more fun Social Minutes we’ve done this year:

Team Word Scramble

During a football unit, I put students in breakout rooms to unscramble football terms at the start of the unit. I challenged the students to get as many words unscrambled in the allotted 10 minutes. The team who got the most right won…bragging rights.

What I did was create a background to SET as a Jamboard. Once I gave students access they were able to write directly on their page however they’d like. When the time was up, I turned off editing access. All of the students came back to the main meet and as my screen was presenting their work, we talked and laughed about each groups effort.

If this is something that interests you, here is a link to this specific Jamboard background template I’ve created using Canva. Feel free to change it up however you’d like!

Survey Questions

This is an easy one. Create a Google Form with question like, “what would you do if you won the lottery”, or “if you could DRIVE anywhere in the U.S. where would you go?” Have them spend a few minutes in the main meet with you filling out their surveys, and then send them off to talk about their answers with their peers.

I tell them to use their survey as a guide, but let them know it’s completely ok to go off topic. Social minutes are for them to SOCIALIZE! The survey is just to get the party started.

Once everyone is back in the main room, you can call on volunteers to share what went on in each group.

You could also take their answers they submitted on their Google Form and create a Blooket trivia game that’s all about them!

Good News Leaders

After sometime, you’ll get to know your students. With that being said, of course you’ll know who your leaders are.

For this engagement strategy I will put students into breakout rooms, but before they leave I assign a good news leader to every group. Their job is to call on each student in the group, ask them what their good news is or talk about literally anything that’s going on in their life, and follow up with 1-2 questions about that students answer. The goal is just for them to have a free flowing conversation.

Even though the leaders “start the party”, anyone can ask any question! When the students return to the main group, the good news leaders have the opportunity to share what went on in their group. Or if the breakout room was fun enough, you’ll probably get other students to share what went on.

Teams Blooket

If you keep reading below, you’ll see one of my engagement strategies is to play Blooket with the kids. But playing the teams version of Battle Royale is such a fun way to wake the kids up and get them ready for your class. The best part about Blooket is that you can make it content specific, or if you’re feeling like guessing the cartoon characters there are plenty of pre made games.

When my students play Battle Royale Teams, I get them all signed in and then I call on a random student to pick a number 1-10. Let’s say they pick 7. I shuffle their teams 7 times (they can see this happening on my shared screen) and on shuffle 7 they will have their teams.

I always tell them during Blookets that I am going to go on mute, but feel free to talk your way through the game. What usually ends up happening is they talk about questions they get wrong, or how close their team was to beating another team each round. It’s so much fun, so if you haven’t ever tried Blooket Battle Royale Teams, I highly suggest you do!

5. Break Out Escape Rooms

A great way to increase student engagement online is to build an escape room. And it’s a lot easier to do than it sounds.

One of my student’s favorites are when they have to solve riddles as a team. First, I put them into breakout rooms of about 4-6 people. Then I jump into each breakout room and drop a link to a Jamboard.

• Click this link for an exact copy of a Jamboard I used: RIDDLE ESCAPE ROOM JAMBOARD.
• This will ask you to make a copy. You can then do what you’d like with it!

After I have given EACH breakout room THEIR OWN Jamboard, I set a timer. The first team to make it back into the main meet before the timer is up is the winner.

Since this is all done in Google Drive, you can check their answers before they even get back into the main meet since you have the master copy of their Jamboard.

You could also play where the first team to “ask for help” in a breakout room wins. You would jump into the room that “asked for help” first, check their answers and either announce them as a winner or tell them they don’t have all riddles correct yet.

Jamboard backgrounds are easily made on Canva. When you click on Create a Design, type in Jamboard background and there ya go!

6. Blooket

If you like Kahoot, wait until you try Blooket!

As mentioned above, I use Blooket all the time to increase student engagement while online. Whether that be the students play in teams, or individually. You can also assign Blookets as classwork or homework for extra practice for whatever content you teach!

All you have to do is create an account (it’s FREE!), then find the create button and begin making your own trivia game.

I always create a set for each sport or unit I teach. We then play at the beginning of the unit. When the game is over I check out the report it gives me and show my kids what their overall class percentage is. Normally for a new unit their accuracy is around 65%-75%. I tell my students that by the end of the unit, I’d like to see that score improve to at least a 90%. And it always does!!

Another way to make playing Blooket more fun is to create a poll in Google Meet titled which game? Students can then vote on what Blooket game they want to play. You’ll begin to notice that each class prefers a different game.

One more really great thing about this, is that it can be self-led. Most of the games have time limits. I will set a timer for 5 minutes, and tell the kids they can unmute and talk/laugh through the game. This gives me a chance to finish up attendance, or send a quick email while they play. And at the end of the game, I am able to go through any questions they might need more clarity on.

7. Fun Friday

We all have something we look forward to at the end of the week. For my students, it’s FUN FRIDAY!

This means that every Friday I allow the kids to work with their cameras off the entire class period. Do you know exactly what they are doing behind the screen…no. But with less micromanaging every little thing they do online, you’d be surprised at how many kids actually participate MORE.

Of course, I always try to keep Friday’s fun and light as it is, but we still do have content to cover or cross curricular games to play. But giving students the option to keep their camera off, will have some positive results.

Using this engagement strategy can also be used to your advantage during the week. Let the kids know our relationship is a two-way street. You give a little you get a little. Cameras on for a good portion of the week, and cameras off on Fridays!

8. Create Your Own Meme

I love a good meme, so I had my student’s make me some!

The topic I introduced was finals week memes. Students had about 30 minutes to work in breakout rooms with their friends (I specifically put them with people I knew they were friends with), but they all made their own.

I then created this Google Document with instructions that they could take with them into their breakout rooms. After the timer was up, students who wanted to share their memes were able to. They got to present their screen and walk us through. We laughed through every class!

9. Everybody Writes

This is a strategy my entire school is implementing, and so far it’s been great.

How it works: present a slide with a question on it. The more open ended the better.

Give students a specific amount of time to work through their answer. The only difference in this strategy, is that the students are writing with a pen/pencil on a piece of paper. Once the timer is up, have them hold their papers up. This will pop on a lot of cameras that are off, but it also takes some of the pressure off of students who are uncomfortable writing in the chat box in fear of having the wrong answer.

Now you can either ask for volunteers to share their answer or cold call. I’ve had great success with this in my high school classes.

10. Brain Breaks & Movement Activities

Lastly, who doesn’t love a good brain break. If you visit Detroit PE on YouTube, you will see over 170 brain breaks, movement games, cross curricular activities, seated movement games, PE warm ups and so much more!

Be sure to check out this channel, like, share, and subscribe!

You can also see who Detroit PE’s favorite YouTube channels are at the bottom of it’s YouTube page. Those are my go-to channels, so be sure to check them out as well!

Enjoy!

Be sure to checkout my other Virtual Ideas of PE here!