Teaching her third and fourth grade students at Jennie Blake Elementary School in Hill, New Hampshire, by video conference last spring, teacher Alicia Schaefer spotted a trend.

“I started to notice that some of my really good students are really social, and they were the ones that seemed to have the hardest time,” Schaefer said. Learning remotely, some of her most gregarious students became listless without the chance to interact with their peers in person.

“Even though they were still doing their work, they just didn’t seem like the same students,” Schaefer said.