Janet Bianchini presented “Visually Inspire Your Students“. The recording to her awesome presentation is here.
Janet has blogged extensively about her presentation here. Don’t miss the opportunity to read about her inspiring ideas about the power of images, cartoons and many tools she suggests with wonderful examples she and her students have created.
I can’t wait to try them myself to inspire and motivate my students. I am going through them to see how I can tailor them to my teaching scenario. I will be sharing my ideas soon.

Marisa Constantinidis‘s presentation: “The teacher as a Scaffold Builder“. The recording to her presentation is here. And the slides to her presentations are here.
Learning(s)
1. Scaffolding as a learning process designed to promote a deeper level of learning (wikipedia)
2. Scaffolding is support given during the learning process which is tailored to the needs of the student with the intention of helping the student achieve their learning goals. (Sawyer, 2006)
3. Steps in the process of scaffolding
These steps or activities were usually thought to be generated by the teacher, while in fact the process is opened to both parties.
a. brainstorm
b. elicit
c. recall
d. activate
e. question
f. research
g. brief
4. Tools we can use in the scaffolding process
a. Models: textual models of spoken and written language
b. Diagrams – Info-graphics – Graphic Organizers
c. Images: generate talk and written language
d. Verbal and Non-verbal cues or prompts: prompts not like in drilling activities, where students are asked to reproduce, generated or substitute grammatical students ask to reproduce rather cues in the sense eliciting bigger chucks of language
5. The Nasa Game
Marisa asked participants if the knew the game, I said “No”, and right today as I started putting my notes together I suddenly remembered I had worked with a similar game like 20 years ago when I was a new teacher. I looked in my book shelves and found the yellowish papers, I’d like to share here:

Reflection: It’s always good to give a look at material we keep on our bookshelves, and we think it’s old and therefore not good anymore. What a wrong assumption I have made. Marisa presented it in a way that my first reaction was: WOW, this is something I could do with my kids. I found this copies in a file with a label  I wrote “The Non-Stp Discussion”, I guess this must be the name of the book I photocopied.
Thanks Marisa, I have learnt about scaffolding and adapting materials
6. Then, she went on to present a reading activity I was lucky to have worked with, when I tried to join  course called “The reading Challenge: Motivation and creativity in Reading Lessons” at Seeta.eu, where Marisa was the instructor.
The activity is called “Husband tried to Kills His Wife 7 Times” and scaffolding would begin by asking students to predict ways this man has tried to kill her, how and why he failed. The they can proceed to scan and skim the article.