Teaching Teacher Students through Innovative Teaching Approaches in Online Learning

Innovative teaching and new teaching and learning approaches are needed in order to prepare the language teachers of tomorrow. As an alternative to asynchronous online instruction, teacher students have teacher-led online seminars every week. In addition to these seminars, several different ICT-tools and language teaching and learning approaches are used in order to prepare the teacher students for a digital future. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how digital resources and online teaching are used both for teaching university students, but also as examples of pedagogical approaches that these teacher students can use in school. The net-based courses on English language learning and teaching for future primary, secondary or upper secondary school teachers are structured in a similar way around online seminar. An online learning platform with course information and assignments is used for communication with students outside of the seminars. What makes these courses different from other net-based courses are that the additional tools that are used are tools that can be used in language teaching with younger pupils as well. For example, multi-modal resources such as video and audio recordings are used both for giving feedback and as an alternative to written assignments. In addition, free, readily available online tools for flipped classroom are used both for teaching the course, but also as examples of what our teacher students can use them for with their own pupils. Through collaborative writing projects where shared documents are used, university teachers gain a better insight in how students work together. In the online seminars, the teacher students discuss how these pedagogical approaches can be used in primary, secondary or upper secondary school. The aim is to let the teacher students experience an innovative approach to language learning in addition to reading about it.