Reflections on My CLMOOC experience

Being a part of the Connected Learning Massive Open Online Collaborative, CLMOOC, has been refreshing this hot, steamy summer. Most of the National Writing Collaborative has found me travelling into the Southern region of Ameica and in and out of family homes and summertime festivities.  Thus, my mooc writing and sharing time has been limited, but I have tried my best to connect and share! I am extremely grateful to the administrators of this project. You made my first mooc most enjoyable! Thanks for making every participant feel so welcome.

My learning curve went  way off the top in only my first two weeks of the project  as I explored and enjoyed vizify, vine, google maps, mapmyfitness, google plus, about.me, twitter, and began to learn what is a MOOC and how it works.

My CLMOOC pathway lead me to  mixing and remixing  fitness, literacy, and making connection with others voicing a similar interest. I learned from one of the Administrators of the project, Terry Elliot, about a good book, Spark, discussing the value of exercise on brain growth.  Reading the book has challenged  me to push harder in my own personal workouts.

Blogging about my #clfit goals of fitness allowed me to cross paths with a  fitness expert on my Tumblr microblog. What a delight as she keeps me inspired to keep working at getting fit.. 

As I move beyond the completion of this project,  my credo sums it up, I will continue to combine: learning, exercising , and sharing. (vizify) There is power in getting fit with the encouragement and help of others. Everyone benefits as we get fit together. 

Framed learning activities of making and remaking, inventing and building upon the work of others, and sharing equally in this process is a positive, forward approach to learning. These activities open wondeful opportunities for teaching organizational skills and sequencing.

What's your story? How can you tell your story? How can you connect with others and outreach? Share your adventures.  Brevity sells...6 word stories, 6 sequence pics, and 6 second videos. It is fun to share stories that leave people hanging and figuring the conclusions on their own.

 I will continue to pursue better approaches to fitness and learn to annotate better and faster  with google maps, my next step in learning -- perhaps another Mooc!

A Welcome Sight

All Dogs Asleep
Originally uploaded by vanhookc

Greetings from the Welcome Center for Dogs. Notice the bike trail along the right hand side! What fun to have pooches greet me along the way with a few yelps as I bike beside the park! There are many beautiful four-legged friends that just love to come out with their proud owners to socialize. The residents of Altoona, Iowa, are fortunate to have this park. See the two sections; small dogs to the left and large dogs to the right. What joy for dog lovers to see their pets playing and having fun!

Play was, likewise, the focus of the Making Learning Connected - National Writing Project during this past week. For me, I enjoyed layering graphics on photos and creating a fractured nursery rhyme version of Hey Diddle Diddle to compliment the final picture. My goodness, how time flies when having fun. I was still working on my project until after midnight!  For others in this week's assignment, realtime and virtual toys were changed, contorted, animated, and repurposed. The goal for the week allowed  people across the globe to have too much fun and make connections with others doing likewise! Isn't that what learning is all about--being creative, producing, and sharing?

Additionally, during the week, I "played" at creating a map of a 13-mile bike run that I successfully biked --not once, but twice!!! This map was downloaded to my computer and then uploaded to Google Maps. What a surprisingly smooth transaction. I dropped a marker of the Altoona, Iowa, Enabling Gardens on this map. See if you can locate this on Google Maps. Likewise, I will want to include this Dog Park on the map!

During the week, I enjoyed increase use of my Tumblr and Blogger accounts. Creating Vizify cards was fun as well. So, you can see, as I lifelong learner, I am doing just that. I cannot wait to see what I learn this next week!