THE APPLICATION OF PADLET AS A TECHNOLOGICAL TOOL IN TEACHING FLIPPED CLASSROOM: A CASE STUDY OF AN ENGLISH SPEAKING CLASSROOM IN VAN LANG UNIVERSITY.

Since 2019, the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic has brought a plethora of switching scenarios to education sector. Schools, institutions, English centers has been struggling to survive in approaching the learners to guarantee that no one is left behind. 2021 has witnessed an escalation in technological teaching platforms and tools to support students. At this time, “survival mode” was the first priority in any institutions so that both teachers and students instantly adapted to new waves of distance learning or e-learning which was considered as new fads in education sector. One pedagogical tool has been widely adopted in this “circuit breaker” era is Padlet due to its friendly uses and highly interactive layout with students. In search for the usefulness of Padlet in teaching and supporting learning outcome, this research examines the perceptions of learners-users towards Padlet through initiating learners’ autonomy and creating meaningful environment for boosting learners’ engagement. This research is conducted in small scale classroom with the presence of 30 learners-users. Date was collected through 4 Likert scale questionnaire and semi-structure interview. The findings also show that students have showed their positive attitude towards the employment of Padlet in class and their learning engagement was also enhanced to some certain extents. Key words: padlet, technological tools, classroom engagement, learners’ autonomy