Steven+Bernier

Steven B. Bernier's page... I found these in commoncraft as an easy explanation for a Wiki, RSS, and Google Reader. media type="custom" key="6416695"

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Connecting math to the real world has become an issue that needs to be addressed in secondary schools today. If we continue to conduct our classrooms with the math teacher sitting at the front of the class at the overhead projector practicing the "teach test and hope for the best" strategy, we may find our students waking up with the Abbot and Costello math thinking process.

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Students are intellligent and creative. Take a look at how this clever secondary student used his creativity to solve a math problem that had no connection to the real world [|funny%20math-science%20image002.jpg]. Perhaps his answer created meaning to the math?

When educators start connecting math to the real world and allow students to explore their own learning we open up the world of learning. Take a look at this video that begins to connect math to our environment. It is entitled "Got Math?"

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As I created my [|delicious page] I began to collect connecting math activities to instruction web sites. This next video demonstrates the difference between a teacher centerd classroom structure and a student centered classroom.

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Schools are can no longer be expected to be the place to go to gather information. Our world has changed and our classroom strategies must be centered on our current students needs. These are the students we have in our classrooms today.

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This final video reminds me of the millenials and their perception feeling today. They learn different, think different and the communicate different than any other generational group. These millenials "did not start the fire", but thay are a civic minded generation and with their love of technology, they will be able to fix the world and the problems we have created with their skills. Only if we teach them to think and use the technology that they are so comfortable with.

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FYI - Related to performance pay is the issue of motivation, what drives people to give their best performance. Author, Daniel Pink's latest book, Drive presents a very readable history of the research on human motivation. He is interviewed by Phi Delta Kappa in the [|May issue of EDge]. There are interesting implications in his work not only for performance pay but also student motivation. Educators found his previous book, A Whole New Mind, worth reading and I believe the same is true of Drive. If you prefer to listen to Daniel Pink present his findings on motivation, I have placed a video of his presentation to a TED conference below. It is 18 minutes long.

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