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This is not an isolated event—schools across the country regularly ban finger use in classrooms or communicate to students that they are babyish. This is despite a compelling and rather surprising branch of neuroscience that shows the importance of an area of our brain that “sees” fingers, well beyond the time and age that people use their fingers to count.

Remarkably, brain researchers know that we “see” a representation of our fingers in our brains, even when we do not use fingers in a calculation

Evidence from both behavioral and neuroscience studies shows that when people receive training on ways to perceive and represent their own fingers, they get better at doing so, which leads to higher mathematics achievement. The tasks we have developed for use in schools and homes (see below) are based on the training programs researchers use to improve finger-perception quality.

Don't feel the need to know everything.

Don't need someone to plan, organize, and lead their professional development.

Don't fear making mistakes.

compiled resource page of the Flipped Classroom (with videos and links) can be found at http://www.scoop.it/t/the-flipped-classroom

Cisco in a recent white paper, Video: How Interactivity and Rich Media Change Teaching and Learning, presents the benefits of video in the classroom: Establishes dialogue and idea exchange between students, educators, and subject matter experts regardless of locations. Lectures become homework and class time is used for collaborative student work, experiential exercises, debate, and lab work. Extends access to scarce resources, such as specialized teachers and courses, to more students, allowing them to learn from the best sources and maintain access to challenging curriculum. Enables students to access courses at higher-level institutions, allowing them to progress at their own pace. Prepares students for a future as global citizens. Allows them to meet students and teachers from around the world to experience their culture, language, ideas, and shared experiences. Allows students with multiple learning styles and abilities to learn at their own pace and through traditional models.

The first tool to use is TinEye, which comes into play when you need to find out the origins of the image and the availability of versions with higher resolution. TinEye will tell you who owns the image, where it comes from and who can use it. You can either upload the image or use its URL.

The Brain Puzzle The Thinking Skills Club organizes fun, cognitively enriching games into a curriculum disguised as a brain puzzle. The puzzle pieces fill with colour as games are passed in all 6 areas of the site: Executive Function, Problem Solving, Memory, Processing Speed, Social Skills and Attention.

Here's an illustration of that process:

The reflection step in this on-going learning cycle is an essential element where assessment happens.

Having students play an active role in this step is distinctive for two reasons:

Let’s look more closely at what is happening, conceptually, when we make an analogy. “The essential requirement for analogical thinking,” Holyoak and Thagard write, “is the ability to look at specific situations and [] pull out abstract patterns that may also be found in superficially different situations.” That’s important, so I’ll say it again in a slightly different way: A useful analogy reveals the deep commonalities beneath superficial differences.

What does this allow us to do? The scientists Kevin Dunbar studied used analogies, first, to formulate hypotheses that they could then test. Their thought process went something like this: If we know that X does Y when Z, is it possible that A does Y when Z, too? Let’s find out. That’s often how innovations get their start, in the lab and elsewhere: by taking a familiar starting point and using it as a launch pad to explore new territory.

The appearance in the transcript of words indicating uncertainty, such as “maybe,” “I don’t know,” and “I don’t understand,” was often followed by an attempt to draw an analogy—to compare the ambiguous situation to a situation with which the scientists were familiar.