Flipping the Second Year Pre-Service Chemistry Teacher Classroom: My Experiences During #Fallism

Introduction

This chapter is an account of the author’s experiences in flipping his 2^nd year Chemistry classroom during the #Fallism movement at a University of Technology in South Africa in 2016. The main aim of this chapter is to narrate how the author used online platforms, such as Blackboard, social media (WhatsApp) and YouTube not only to complete his curriculum during this period, but also how he used these Web 2.0 applications to support his students dealing with challenging content. Hermanns (2002) describes the term ‘supporting’ as referring to ‘all those activities which aim at improving [students’] educational situation, in other words, helping educators to educate’. Vandemeulebroecke (2002) expands on the meaning of support by stating that it entails a set of measures, structures, services and activities that directly enrich or optimise the educational context with the aim of creating ideal educational and developmental opportunities for students. Thus conceived, in this chapter ‘support’ refers to the way that the author used various online tool to communicate, design and develop his lessons, and present them with their associated assessment tasks. A direct consequence of this flipped model (which will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter) was to promote and encourage self-directed and deeper learning in Chemistry. From this perspective, the author provides details on how his technological pedagogical approach can be used to encourage deeper learning. Deeper learning amongst students take place when they are enabled to engage actively with content by independently researching concepts, formulas various other challenging questions by using online tools. Through such activities they are given the space to think for themselves, which is a different approach from the conventional face-to-face teaching and learning environments.