Yesterday I received a postcard reminding me of my yearly hearing check up. I was glad that they did not call 🙂 I thought about students in the classroom. How many of them are getting messages in a form that is hard for them to “hear” ?
Are teachers scaffolding the learning in step by step increments so that each student can climb to success? Those students who do not need every step can quickly climb.
Does the scaffolding allow students to see, hear and physically experience the learning?
Madeline Hunter felt that teachers should provide input (the prerequisite knowledge) for the students before teaching the new concept.
A male Spanish teacher who is going to teach shopping words for clothing will want to review basic vocabulary such as colors and purchasing words such as to buy, price before he teaches the clothing. He can go to Google and quickly find a color wheel so the students can identify the colors. He find pictures of people buying clothing to review or teach buy, sell, and price by using the technology of Google or flickr and Power Point.
When he moves to the main part of the lesson, he can show students the clothing with the Spanish word next to it and then ask the students to point to that clothing that someone is wearing. The Power Point scaffolds the students’ learning so that they can see the item, see the Spanish word, hear the word as the teacher says it, and then use it as a basis for pointing to it in the classroom. If the teacher wanted, he could go to a website that says the words so the students can hear another person say the same word.
As the teacher has the students have conversations about the clothing, he can have them role play based on clothing situation visuals taken from Google or Flickr. The students can use the visual prompts from the visuals to assist them in their speaking. Those students who need scaffolding can constantly refer to the visual while those who do not need such scaffolding use the visual as a jumping off point.
By using technology to scaffold the learning, all students can learn and use Spanish clothing shopping words.
Education with Technology Harry G. Tuttle 
I used this article as a reference point for the below discussion question for an Educational Pyschology class I had in my Master’s program at Quincy University. Thank you!
In what ways does technology “scaffold” student learning?