THE USE OF GOOGLE MEET FOR ONLINE MICROTEACHING

: The social distancing and the closure of schools during the Pandemic force both teachers and students to teach and study remotely. In order to facilitate pre-service teachers learning to teach, the instructor of the Microteaching who is also the researcher opted to use Google Meet (GM) as a teaching platform in Microteaching class. Aiming at uncovering the perspectives of pre-service teachers in using GM as an online teaching platform for teaching their peers, the current study involved the sixth semester students in Microteaching class as its research participants. The main data were obtained through open-ended questionnaire. To triangulate the data, the videos of five pre-service teachers ’ teaching demonstrations and five students’ written reflections were also used as a source of data. The obtained data were analyzed thematically based on the emerging themes. In so doing, the researcher firstly read the results of the open-ended questionnaire and the students’ reflection closely and started codifying the data. The findings show that preservice teachers have positive impression toward the use of GM and consider that as useful in the pandemic time. In terms of the challenge they faced, internet connection was found to be the major obstacle in teaching peers using GM.


INTRODUCTION
In many teacher education programs, teaching practicum has been an important component (Canh, 2014;Köksal & Genç, 2019;Nguyen, 2015). While teaching practicums have been usually done in school contexts, it is also common that pre-service teachers have practicums in university setting as a preparation for teaching practicum in school contexts. Known as microteaching, teaching practicum has been an integral part of teacher preparation program (Reddy, 2019) for it provides opportunities for pre-service teachers to practice teaching and enhances their teaching skills (Ahmed et al., 2019;Ahn & Park, 2020;Imaniah, 2019;Ismail, 2011;Önal, 2019;Özonur & Kamışlı, 2019;Reddy, 2019) before the teacher candidates have teaching practicum at school settings. For many students teachers, microteaching is often their first real teaching experience (Diana, 2013). Thus, it is important for preservice teachers to have microteaching before they practice teaching in the real classroom settings at schools.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic started in the 2020, teacher education program has encountered challenges (Sasaki et al., 2020) in dealing with teaching practicums. As both students and teachers are not allowed to have face to face meetings, microteaching as a teaching practicum in a university setting has been done online since the outbreak of the COVID 19 Pandemic. Consequently, microteaching has been done in many ways, one of which is done by asking students to teach imaginary students and video recording their teaching performances. While this was one of the alternatives that can be used to overcome the sudden change caused by the Pandemic, the absence of face-to-face meeting in microteaching possibly make pre-service teachers unable to learn how to teach students in real situations just like before the occurrence of the COVID-19 Pandemic.
To provide an opportunity for pre-service teachers to experience teaching with real students, the researcher, who is also the instructor of microteaching class opted to use GM for microteaching class. The GM was chosen because of its convenience for both the instructor and the student teachers and its availability for both the instructor and the students of an Indonesian university where the research took place. While GM has also been used for teaching other courses within the university for synchronous online teaching mode, there is little information related to how students view the use of this available technologybased for teaching practicums. Furthermore, since microteaching requires students to practice teaching to their peers, it is important to know how teacher candidates' view the use GM as a platform to teach their peers. In particular, the study sought to answer the following research questions: 1. How do pre-service EFL teachers view the use of Google Meet in their Microteaching class? 2. What are the challenges that the pre-service teachers face in using Google Meet for teaching their peers?

LITERATURE REVIEW
The importance of Microteaching for enhancing pre-service teachers' teaching skills The importance of microteaching in enhancing student teachers' skills in teaching has been widely acknowledged. It has also attracted much attention of researchers in the field of professional development programs (Hong et al., 2017). Research indicates that microteaching has been useful for preservice teachers as it provides opportunities for them to practice teaching (Önal, 2019), to plan and apply teaching methods and techniques (Özonur & Kamışlı, 2019), to improve various teaching skills (Ahn & Park, 2020;Bakır, 2014;Imaniah, 2019), and to develop effective teaching strategies (Ismail, 2011). Due to its importance in enhancing teacher candidates' teaching skills, microteaching has also been studied to know how pre-service teachers do reflective practices (Önal, 2019;Riyanti, 2020), use reinforcement strategies (Jonaria & Ardi, 2020), use questioning strategies (Sunra & Nur, 2020), selfefficacy (Arsal, 2014), and pre-service teachers' perceptions (Imaniah, 2019;Ismail, 2011;Kusmawan, 2017;Merc, 2015;Özonur & Kamışlı, 2019), developing learners autonomy (Bodis et al., 2020) While there has been abundant research related to microteaching, there is still a dearth research related to online microteaching. Among the five studies related to students' views on microteaching, there are only two studies focusing on the students' perceptions toward online microteaching (Kusmawan, 2017;Merc, 2015). Furthermore, little information related to preservice view on the use of particular platforms for online microteaching is found in the literature. Thus, there is a need to explore the student teachers' view on the use of a particular platform for teaching practicum. The current research fills the research gap by investigating how students view on the use of GM, one of the online teaching platforms that many teachers use during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Microteaching activities
Initially developed by the University of Stanford in the 1960s, microteaching has been widely applied in teacher education program (Bakır, 2014;Koross, 2016). In Indonesian contexts, microteaching has been part of component in teacher education programs in some universities, and it has been used as a method to improve pre-service teachers' teaching quality (Kusmawan, 2017). In the university where the current study took place, microteaching has been a pre-requisite course, in which pre-service teachers must pass the course before having teaching practicums at school settings. Involving small numbers of people, microteaching is led by an instructor during a semester-long. Before the pandemic, this microteaching class was done face to face in the classroom setting, and this can be equated with the "traditional practices" (Kusmawan, 2017, p. 43). As microteaching was intended to improve student teachers' teaching skills, the preservice teachers' activities covers creating lesson plans, teaching peers based on the lesson plans, and providing feedback among students, and doing reflections. The instructor's responsibilities, on the other hand, are leading the class, providing feedback for each pre-service teachers' performance, as well as grading the students whether they passed the microteaching class.
As the COVID 19 pandemic hit the world, the traditional practices of microteaching can no longer be done face to face in the classroom settings. In many university settings, including in the current research site, microteaching has been done virtually in the last two years. While this online microteaching cannot be equated with "a multifaceted method of microteaching" (Kusmawan, 2017, p. 44), the online microteaching in the current research is different from face to face in offline mode. All microteaching activities are done online both synchronously and asynchronously. The synchronous activities are especially for teaching peers and providing feedback for each teaching demonstration. While the asynchronous mode is especially for non-teaching activities such as written feedback and lesson plans.

METHOD Participants
The participants of the study involve all the sixth semester students of the English education program who took microteaching class in 2021 in an Indonesian university. To reach the research participants, the researcher contacted the head of the study program and informed about the research. Additionally, several lecturers who were involved in the microteaching class were contacted and were asked to help the researcher to share the link for the open-ended questionnaire which was shared online through a google form. The total number of 47 student teachers (35 females and 12 males) participated in the fulfilling the open-ended questionnaire. In order to protect the privacy of the participants, the names of the participants in this study are pseudonyms and are abbreviated in forms of initials.

Instruments
The main data for this study were obtained open-ended questionnaire. The open-ended questionnaire contained five questions related to the participants' views on the use of google meet as an online platform for teaching their peers in microteaching class, and three questions related to participants' demographic information. Additionally, video recordings of five student teachers were also used as a source of data. The five students were chosen because they were in the researcher's microteaching class. To triangulate the data, the researcher's notes from observing the five pre-service teachers' teaching performances, written reflections, and lesson plans from the five teacher candidates in the researcher's microteaching class were also used as secondary data sources.

Data Analysis
The obtained data were analyzed qualitatively. The data from the questionnaire were first be read carefully. The next stage was codifying the data, which was done by putting labels on the data. The labels were then grouped into categories as the emerging themes are identified. The video recordings were watched again in the process of analyzing the data to see whether the data from the questionnaire match the classroom observations. The student teachers' written reflections were first read closely and then were codified as well. Whereas the lesson plans were analyzed whether the teaching performances were based on the lesson plans.

FINDINGS Views on the use of GM for teaching peers in Microteaching class
From the analysis of the open-ended questionnaire, it is found that pre-service teachers' views on the use of Google Meet as a platform for their peer teaching activities in their microteaching class are varied. There are several categorizations of the theme related to views on the use of GM, such as the usefulness of the GM for learning to teach in pandemic time and for helping them to be confident teachers.

The usefulness of GM for teaching peers in the pandemic time
Data from the questionnaire indicate that pre-service teachers consider online microteaching using GM as an alternative for solving problems related to meeting face to face in the classroom in offline mode, which was impossible to be done in the pandemic time. The use of GM is deemed to be suitable for ensuring safety in the pandemic time and to minimize the spread of COVID 19. For the participants who resided in their home town, the use of GM is useful for them as they did not have to go to campus. Furthermore, online microteaching using GM as a suitable way to practice teaching in the pandemic time. Over 19 % of the respondents claimed that the use of GM helps them learn to teach in the pandemic situation. The following excerpt is one of the evidences of how the participants view their experience teaching their peer using GM: In my view on using Google Meet for teaching my peers in Microteaching class is an effective activity which enough for today's condition (due to Coronavirus). We can still practice, evaluate, and give feedback and suggestion of our work with each other the same way like offline class. All of us get the chance to practice to teach and we get feedback both from our friends and the lecturer too. I myself considered this as a good thing to improve our teaching practice. (Questionnaire, NV) As indicated in the above excerpt, NV considered that the utilization of GM made it possible for her to practice teaching and learn from each other in pandemic time. Similarly, other respondents also consider GM as useful in the pandemic time where face to face interaction in the classroom is not possible. AG, for example, mentioned that in her opinion, using Google Meet for teaching her peers in microteaching class was a great way and right decision in this pandemic because they could keep studying." Similar opinion was also stated by NR. In responding to the question related to her view of using GM, she wrote, "in this pandemic situation, I think using GMeet is the good choice. We can still do teaching and learning activity with seeing their faces. So it is like we are in the class but virtually". Additionally, it is also useful for students who live far from campus in their hometown as mentioned by FR. For him, GM is considered to be "really helpful for those who live in the village to have a teaching process".
Even though some respondents still consider having offline microteaching is better because they can practice teaching directly face to face in the classroom as mentioned by one of the respondents: In my opinion the main thing that make offline learning is preferred because both teachers and their students are able to participate fully in the class without any disturbance, like internet connection problem or the problem based on the devices used. Using Google meet for teaching online is helpful for sure, but we can't deny some bad impact in using it. (Questionnaire, NW) As shown in the excerpt above, even though NW consider online microteaching as useful, but they are less superior than face to face microteaching in an off line mode. Partly because online microteaching is often unpredicted due to problems related to internet connection and device errors.

The enjoyment of using GM for online microteaching
In addition to be useful for microteaching in the pandemic time, GM is also considered to be helpful in making pre-service teachers enjoy the process of teaching and learning in microteaching classes. When the participants played a role as teachers, they could see their peer students enjoyed their teaching as indicated by CH, one of the respondents. She said, "It is very interesting and also helpful. My friends enjoyed when I taught them through GMeet. Even though, the way I teach is still not optimal." While CH thought that her way of teaching their peer students needed to be improved, she claimed that her peer students could keep up with her during her teaching practice. In the same vein, CN revealed that she enjoyed teaching using GM. In the questionnaire, CN wrote: "although sometimes there is a technical problem due to internet connection, yet still I truly enjoyed teaching my peers through Google Meet. As can be concluded from the two excerpts in the questionnaire, both CH and CN consider GM as a platform for microteaching where both students and teachers can enjoy.

Positive impressions of using GM for online microteaching
In addition to becoming an alternative way of microteaching in pandemic time, GM is also considered to be flexible and comfortable for the student teachers in the study for several reasons. The first one is that GM offers facilities to share learning media that have been prepared by the student teachers as indicated in the following excerpt: I think the use of Google meet in teaching practice is very good because we can easily integrate various kinds of learning media easily, such as using interactive ppt, videos from youtube, learning games etc. (Questionnaire, AZ) As indicated in the above excerpt, AZ can integrate various teaching media in teaching their peers during microteaching class through GM. Partly because GM offers screen share feature where the user can share audio, video, and a combination of both.

Self-confidence improvement
Furthermore, the use of GM contributes to making students confidence in teaching their peers. NV, one of the participants mentioned, "It (GM) helped me a bit and reduce my nervous for teaching because I didn't teach in the real classroom". For AG, not facing real students in the classroom as in an offline mode, made her more confidence as she did not have to face the students directly. Similar opinion is addressed by another participant, AG, as shown in the following excerpt: Google Meet helped me to lose nervous and anxious when I practiced teaching in front of my peers. Also, it helped me to improve confidence and to maintain my focus to teach. (Questionnaire, AG) As indicated in the above excerpt, microteaching through GM reduced the pre-service teachers' nervousness and anxiety as they teach their peers. This finding also shows that not all pre-service teachers are ready to teach their peers and that they still consider teaching as challenging activities even though they just practice teaching their peers. Interacting directly face to face is somehow more challenging for student teachers in the study compared to interacting face to face virtually.

The strengths of GM for online microteaching
Apart from becoming an alternative for teaching practicum in the pandemic, GM is considered to have strengths for several reasons. The first reason is its flexibility and accessibility. The first reason is that its flexibility in terms of place and time as long as there is a stable internet connection. For many student teachers who decided to stay in their home town during the pandemic, the utilization of GM for microteaching gives them ease and comfort as they did not have to go to campus. NW, for example, claimed that "I can present my materials safely from my home so that I am not wasting my time also my money to printing this and that". In addition to flexibility, GM is also easily accessed by the student teachers as indicated in the following excerpt: GMeet is very helpful in the efficiency and flexibility of learning time because students can participate in the learning process in difficult situations that cannot be avoided during normal schools and also it helps mastery the use of technology in the teaching and learning process. (Questionnaire, AJ) I get many advantages from using Google Meet in teaching and learning activities, such as students who were previously less active become more active, the time and place used are more flexible, and provide a more learning experience regarding the use of online applications. (Questionnaire, HM) As shown in the two excerpts above, both AJ and HM consider GM to be beneficial not only for its flexibility, but also for learning to use the technology for both teaching and learning process. For HM, the use of GM also possibly makes students more active. This indicates that GM pre-service teachers have positive views on the use of GM for online microteaching. Another benefit of GM for microteaching is its ability to record the meetings. With this feature, student teachers are able to evaluate their teaching performance later as shown in the following excerpt: The benefit is that we can teach and present our learning materials through ppt easily. And we can record the learning activities that we have done, so that we can evaluate our teaching performance in the future. (Questionnaire, AZ) As indicated in the excerpt above, AZ claims that the available feature for recording in GM make it possible for him to have his teaching demonstration recorded. This also makes it possible for him to watch his teaching performance later and possibly make reflection to improve the quality of his teaching for the next teaching demonstration.
The next reason is that microteaching through GM can be as useful as microteaching in offline face-to-face mode. From the analysis of the questionnaire, it is found that for some pre-service teachers, GM can be used to replace an offline mode of microteaching as indicated in the following excerpt: Although we couldn't do teaching practice in real-time and place, I thought having online teaching practice through GMeet was not that different. During the practice, I could see my friends' faces and hear their voices. I could also share my screen. We communicated throughout the practice just like offline teaching. The only problem was an internet connection. Sometimes, the internet connection was so bad that I couldn't see anyone's face. (Questionnaire, EB) As shown in the above excerpt, EB considers the use of google meet can be equated with doing microteaching face to face in the classroom. This is partly because GM offers features that make users able to interact and communicate to each other just like in the classroom.

The weaknesses of GM for online microteaching
Data analysis from the questionnaire clearly indicates that the main weakness of teaching peers using Google Meet is internet connection. The internet connection problem affects the process of teaching and learning in microteaching class seriously as indicated in the following excerpts: The fact that students would easily lose their focus while me teaching them? It may be caused by the way I deliver the material in their device was lagging or they suddenly log out that makes them hard to follow the class also understand the materials (Questionnaire, NW)) The weakness is if someone has the low internet connection it affects the quality of their video also audio at the same time while having the google meeting (Questionnaire, FR) The weakness is the internet connection. When the connection is unstable while I am explaining the material, I need to re-do it again because my video will be freezing when the connection is poor. So, it sometimes takes longer time than offline class (Questionnaire, NV) As shown in the excerpts above, the internet connection problem causes various disruptions in the process of teaching and learning in the microteaching class. Poor quality of audio and videos are several of them as indicated by FR and NV. This poor quality of teaching media often leads the pre-service teachers to reexplain the materials as indicated by NV. The poor material delivery due to internet connection also lead the students to lose their focus and difficulty in understanding the materials presented in peer teaching sessions as indicated by NW.

The challenges of using Google meet in teaching peers
Connected to the teacher candidates' views of using GM for online microteaching, it can be identified that pre-service teachers in the study faced challenges in teaching their peers using GM. The challenges that the participants encountered in using GM to teach their peers are illustrated in the Figure 1. Figure 1. The percentages of challenges encountered by preservice teachers in using GM for online microteaching.
As indicated in the pie chart, internet connection is the most challenge that the participants experienced during microteaching class, meanwhile challenge related to the use of multimedia was the least problem for the pre-service teachers. While the participants also still encountered other problems in teaching their peers using GM, such as problems related to device errors and inadequate skills of using technology for teaching, the other problems comprised only 7% of the whole problems in using GM for microteaching. The other problems include limited time availability for microteaching, maintaining peers' attention, and providing assignments to their peers.
Data analysis from the classroom observations also indicate that internet connection was the main problem in using GM for 87% 6% 7% CHALLENGES OF USING GOOGLE MEET FOR MICROTEACHING Bad internet connection Multimedia problem Others microteaching. The process of peer teaching was frequently distracted when the internet connection was suddenly lost. The pre-service teachers who were in the middle of teaching their peers disappeared from the screen in the case of lost connection. When the internet connection was unstable, the voice of the both the teacher candidates playing the role of the teacher and the students unclear and sometimes was echoing. It frequently happened that the peer teacher had to repeat the explanation and therefore took longer time to finish his/her teaching demonstrations.

DISCUSSION
In terms of the pre-service teachers' views on the online microteaching, the findings of the current study resonate with previous research conducted by Kusmawan (2017) and Merç (2015), in which pre-service teachers have positive views and gained benefits from their online microteaching. The current research findings also add more insights related to the pre-service teachers' views on the use of online microteaching platforms, which have not been addressed in the previous two studies. While the focus of microteaching in the current study resembles the traditional practices of microteaching (Kusmawan, 2017), the findings indicate that preservice teachers consider the use of Google Meet is not much different from having microteaching face to face in the classroom, and that microteaching can be used to replace offline microteaching. This is perhaps because the participants are still able to do what they have to do in face-to-face microteaching in offline mood in terms of meeting their peer students in real-time face to face through GM. They can still also use teaching media, which they may use it in the classroom setting in off line mode using Power point slides.
In relation to students' impression related to online microteaching, the findings of the current study is different from the study related to online microteaching done by (Merç, 2015) where the participants encountered a certain degree of anxiety. The pre-service in the current study, on the contrary, felt more confident as they did not have to teach their peers face to face in the classroom. This is possibly because in online microteaching using GM, the teacher candidates have limited access to their peer students' reactions when they are teaching. The feature of on and off camera in the GM possibly make student teachers less nervous when teaching their peers as they can easily hide their face and their feelings.
Furthermore, the current findings also support previous research related to pre-service teachers' positive views on microteaching (Bağatur, 2015;Hartawati et al., 2018;Imaniah, 2019;Ismail, 2011;Koross, 2016;Özonur & Kamışlı, 2019). Despite the difference in the mode of microteaching, the participants in the current study consider microteaching to be beneficial for them in improving their teaching skills.
In terms of the challenges faced by pre-service teachers, the findings of the current research provide new insights about online microteaching using GM. For the pre-service teachers in the current study, the major problem they encountered in having microteaching class using GM is internet connection problem. This can be understood because the participants are from different regions in West Kalimantan where the availability of internet is not evenly spread. For the participants who live in their home town far away from the city center, internet signal and even phone signal are not always strong. Additionally, since GM require a stable internet connection, which means requiring more internet quota than other applications such as WhatsApp and Facebook, not all students were able to join GM without any problems. In contrast to the findings from the study by Merç (2015) where the pre-service teachers encounter a certain degree of foreign language anxiety, the pre-teacher candidates in the current study did not find any problems related to anxiety.

CONCLUSION
Microteaching has been an important component in teacher education and has been proven that it helps teacher candidates to improve various teaching skills and their confidence. With the advance of technology and the outbreak of the COVID 19 pandemic, online microteaching has been considered to be crucial in preparing teacher candidates to be skillful teachers. With the abundant available online microteaching platforms, understanding pre-service teachers' views in the use of a certain platform is also important. Through collecting data qualitatively and analyzing them, it can be concluded from the current research that the pre-service teachers have positive views on the use of GM as a platform for online synchronous microteaching, especially in the pandemic time. Google Meet has been found to offer many benefits for the pre-service teachers in teaching their peers in microteaching. The only main challenge in utilizing Google meet is dealing with unstable internet connection.