Using Flipgrid for teaching practice: Pre-service student teachers’ reflections and lessons learnt

Abstract

Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, South African universities have, like other universities worldwide, been faced with the transition from face-to-face classes to online teaching. Teaching practice (TP) coordinators (university lecturers responsible for the work-integrated learning component of teacher training programmes) found themselves having to improvise and innovate to meet this sudden pedagogical change by revisiting conventional TP models and approaches and finding new ways to give student teachers valid and constructive alternatives to face-to-face classes when these were suspended (Carrillo and Flores, 2020; Hojeij and Baroudi, 2021; Sepulveda-Escobar and Morrison, 2020). From the perspective of pre-service student teachers at a South African university, this case study reviews the effectiveness of ‘Flipgrid’, a social-learning video platform, which was successfully integrated into a third-year TP module. One of its greatest strengths proves to be its ability to provide pre-service student teachers with the opportunity to gain confidence in their teaching abilities.