Digital Practices & Applications in a Covid-19 Culture

This article addresses reflections of one University instructor’s teaching and her pre-teacher education students’ innovative digital learning practices during the Covid-19 pandemic in Spring 2020. The question of How has one instructor embedded digital practices in her virtual teaching to engage and purposefully introduce and connect pre-teacher education students with diverse technologies and multimodalities of learning during a mandatory virtual instruction time? will be addressed and discussed. Student-centered practices such as group work, pair work, the use of Zoom breakout rooms, and multimodal literary responses through technology applications such as Flipgrid and Google Docs will be described and reflected upon. The instructor’s own teaching practices that have included weekly mentoring meetings with her education students and continuing individual coffee meetings in diverse settings will be highlighted as ways of demonstrating care and encouragement toward face-to-face students who have been transitioned as online students. The reflections outlined in this abstract draw upon the notion of technologies as providers of active interactions and will include snapshots of an instructors’ students’ digital artifacts such as Flipgrid, video-recorded monologues, and Google Doc news stories with students reflecting on the uses of multimodal technologies in their own future teaching practices. This manuscript will also include student reflections and a sidebar of suggestions for using Zoom with virtual teaching.