CLMOOC Sparkles by Sheri Edwards

As Sheri Edwards points out, CLMOOC *sparkles* and it is because of YOU. It’s been so lovely to spend the summer making, sharing and connecting together. Thank you to all.

But Connected Learning is not a shiny new thing for us to be momentarily attracted to only to abandon. Quite the contrary, connected learning offers a lasting effect. Our interest-driven work, our peer-connected open networks, and our connections around shared purposes are an ongoing and participatory conversation.

The principles of Connected Learning are our shared framework. These principles are the language and tools to support our teacher and learner agency. In this way, the ideas that have emerged from the CLMOOC summer experience can help us all move forward with critical and collective conversations. In turn, we can bring these ideas “home” in our own contexts and communities throughout the year. In this sense, the CLMOOC and Connected Learning experience is also a movement. We are a community of like-minded educators and learners seeking to create rich, relevant and connected learning ecosystems.

Continue the Conversation.

Gathered quotes from CLMOOC and #clmooc Twitter Chats remind us where we’ve been and where we are going …

#Connectedlearning has changed how I view group work and how I seek input for support of my changing curriculum. – Michelle Stein

I believe information should be available in multi-modal ways because different people have different preferences and needs. – Maha Bali

And maybe that is what I find appealing–the opportunity to play and explore without the stress of having to be perfect. – Janet Chow

I’ll be explicitly teaching about connected learning principles and try to embody them with activities in teacher trainings. – Chris Butts

It’s important to get students to stop and observe and listen. – Simon Ensor

Power is an idea. Ideas have power. What’s the fuel? – Kristine Konruff

#connectedlearning goes back to Dewey, Vygotsky, Piaget, Papert—not new, just neglected. – Sheri Edwards

A maker is, first and foremost, a mistaker. – Molly Shields

Having a real, personal connection is so valuable and so important. It’s at the heart of learning and teaching. – Chris Campbell

Do you speak in images? – Kim Douillard

… as blog posts are being turned into images and images are turned into posts …

Play and Generosity by Scott Glass

How Connected Learning
Brought My Family Closer Together
by Kira Baker-Doyle

Meme by Kira Baker-Doyle

… meaning is being made and shared by those reflecting on their connections …

Connected Learning Thinglink
created by Karen Fasimpaur, tweeted by @tutormentorteam

… and makes are being banked as resources for continued re-imagination.

First Grade Mapping Skills by Erin Polski

Join the Movement.

Just as all of us spent the summer in the CLMOOC as part of a larger community, so too is the Making Learning Connected 2014 part of something larger. While our formal Make Cycles are now coming to a calendar-close, the spirit of the Make will remain live and vibrant in places like Educator Innovator.

Educator Innovator, powered by the National Writing Project, as many of you know, sponsored CLMOOC. What you might not know is that Educator Innovator is both a network of networks—EI has lots of great partners, like Maker Education, Edutopia, Institute of Play, Mozilla’s Webmaker, and many more—and an online community of educators like yourselves who are interested in the intersection of play, learning and creativity. Educator Innovator has great resources, like blog posts and webinars, that help you stay abreast of the latest opportunities from partners who are interested in engaging educators, both formal and informal, in the kinds of production-centered, interest-driven, Connected Learning work represented through events like CLMOOC.

Image from Light Play by Simon Ensor

Build Connected Ecosystems.

• Connect learning in your own context.
• Stay connected over social media and use the hashtags #connectedlearning and #clmooc.
• Share what you’ve learned publicly by presenting to others and publishing/cross-posting your work to communities such as NWP Digital Is.
• Use, remix, create, share and document Makes others can use in the Make Bank.
• Apply for the Educator Innovator Maker Badge and Join the Movement.
• Continue to build/grow/play!

eCircuitry collage by Stephanie West-Puckett and her colleagues at the Tar River Writing Project

Apply for the Educator Innovator Maker Badge

This badge is awarded to educators who’ve produced connected learning-based resources, events, curriculum and/or created artifacts that demonstrate Connected Learning principles in action or in theory.

To receive this badge, simply go to Educator Innovator’s Maker badge page and submit your criteria by clicking on the “get this badge” button. Use the partner code CLMOOC2014 upon submitting. (For more information about badges in general, visit Mozilla’s Open Badges website.)

Thank you.

We leave you with a tweet from Terry Elliott that expresses our shared discovery this summer: that we need every one of you.

From all of us at Educator Innovator and the CLMOOC team, thank you.

We’re wrapping up the #clmooc this week through reflection, connection and looking forward. Today, we want to support you in considering where you are now in relation to where you have been and where you hope to go. Below are a few of the makes from the Make Bank to get you going and give you choices. We invite you to make, remix, game and play with making this week as you reflect.

Where are You?: Make a Travel Log 

registered CC0 1.0 in the public domain

Push pause. Take a moment.

Where are you now in your thinking about making, composing, and connected learning? Has your thinking shifted? Have the tools you used changed? After you hacked your writing, did you discover something new? Are you now finding ways to make a game out of daily tasks?

One way to reflect is to take stock of the here and now. Here are two reflective makes that help you focus in on a make or a Make Cycle:

Maker’s Notes: Create a short reflective video or audio recordings in order to think through a week’s experiences making, writing and connecting. See the Maker’s Notes for detailed directions and the Maker’s Note Guide for topics and questions we hope inspire your reflection.

Make Log: Document your on- and offline making activities. This can include makes-in-progress and even an activity that you think failed. Document your processes however you’d like: take pictures, gather drafts, keep a journal, video record your processes…the possibilities are nearly endless. See the Make Log in the Make Bank for more ideas! You can also make a space to record some of your own favorite work from #clmooc. See the CLMOOC Portfolio to get you going!

Where have you been?: Make a Map of your Learning Pathways

registered CC0 1.0 in the public domain

Rewind. Replay.

Another way to reflect is to look back over the past to see what terrain you and your colleagues have covered. Looking back, what does the learning pathway you created this summer look like? When did insights about making, composing and connected learning occur? How was your making driven by your interests? How was your learning and making supported by peers? How was your learning and making connected to larger systems?

Make a Map: To help you envision your learning pathways, you can make a literal map of a figurative learning journey. If learning is a journey, where has it taken you? Where did you begin? Where are you now? When have you charted undiscovered country? When have you bumped into a border? How does making help your learning journey move forward or into new ground? See the Make a Map make in the Make Bank, and Learning Maps from #clmooc 2013 for mentor texts.

Make a Case: As educators, we can learn quite a bit from case studies of youths’ learning. We invite you to to take on the inquisitive stance of an educational researcher and make a study of your own learning pathways in the Make a Case three-make challenge.

CC BY SA 4.0 at Educator Innovator

Apply for the Educator Innovator Maker Badge: This badge is awarded to educators who’ve produced connected learning-based resources, events, curriculum and/or created artifacts that demonstrate Connected Learning principles in action or in theory.

To receive this badge, simply go to Educator Innovator’s Maker badge page and submit your criteria by clicking on the “get this badge” button. Use the partner code CLMOOC2014 upon submitting. (For more information about badges in general, visit Mozilla’s Open Badges website.)

Where are you going?: Plan Future Routes

registered CC0 1.0 in the public domain

Fast forward. Anticipate possible futures.

Imagine your identity as a connected learner and educator into the near, middle, and far future. What will you be making next week? When you are designing curriculum and instruction in the fall, what will it look like?

Annotated Dialogues: Find a friend, find a quiet spot, grab the Dialogue Prompts, and discuss making, learning and connecting. Take your reflections further by recording the conversation and annotating it with links, images, and comments. See the Annotated Dialogue in the Make Bank for more information and ideas.

Send an Email to Your Future Self: Here, in this moment, you are thinking about all the amazing ideas you tried out this summer and want to use in your classroom. But summer ends, and Fall begins, and the swirling activity of the new school year quickly invades the contemplative self you have nurtured in the CLMOOC. Why not send yourself a note of support and a list of ideas to your future self? A site such as Letter Me Later allows you to write an email now but have it delivered later. Be kind to yourself.

Help #clmooc

As part of our collective effort at CLMOOC this year, where we seek to understand the learning pathways that are being forged in this connected professional learning environment, we are asking for your help!

Please find a quick survey that asks for information about your social media names, @handles, URLs, etc. so that we can make sure we have seen all of your contributions, and best know how to connect the many ways folks participate in our community.

Live Events

Join us TONIGHT, Wednesday, July 30 at 9 p.m. Eastern on Teachers Teaching Teachers. The discussion will focus on the concept of annotating text with digital tools. Our own Terry Elliott will be joining TTT host Paul Allison to mull over digital annotation and collaborative marking up of documents and video.

And on Thursday, July 31st at 7p.m. Eastern come together for the #clmooc Twitter Chat where we will focus on Connected Learning now and into the future! Brainstorm questions for the community on this document.

Stay Connected

Just as all of us spent the summer in the #clmooc as part of a larger community, so too is Making Learning Connected 2014 part of something larger. While our formal Make Cycles are now coming to a calendar-close, the spirit of the Make will remain live and vibrant in places like Educator Innovator.

We invite you to consider subscribing to Educator Innovator by visiting educatorinnovator.org.

Peace in the connecting,
CLMOOC Team

The beginning of the end…and the end of the beginning

Welcome to the closing week of our Making Learning Connected Massive Open Online Collaboration (#clmooc). The Hudson Valley Writing Project’s team of Bonnie Kaplan, Marc Schroeder, Andrea Tejedor, and Jack Zangerle deserve thanks and a round of applause for leading our exploration of 5-image stories. They helped us consider digital composition from a fresh perspective by training our attention on photographs and their ability to shape narrative. Best of all, they got us making.

We will turn our attention this week to wrapping up our collaboration by reflecting and connecting. Supported by three newsletters spread out through Friday, this week is all about making sense of the making and connecting you did this summer. In other words, let’s make formal what we’ve been doing informally all summer. We invite you to reflect in a way that synthesizes what your #clmooc experience has meant to you and your work. We invite you to connect with other participants and other learning opportunities to extend your making, playing and learning.

“Where to” by Scott Glass

Reflect on #clmooc as a learning experience for you.

We know #clmooc wasn’t a course. If it were, Scott Glass couldn’t have joined us at all. He had a road trip to take. Since #clmooc was a collaboration, we helped Scott plan his road trip during Make Cycle #3. At the conclusion of his trip, he shared his 5-Image Story with us.

We know #clmooc wasn’t a course. If it were, our subscription numbers would have been enrollment numbers. We’d be lamenting incomplete work and absent students. Since #clmooc was a collaboration, we welcomed subscribers to watch, to read, and to contemplate joining in. We use the word “lurk” as a synonym for love.

We know #clmooc wasn’t a course. If it were, you would be hastily looking over your notes and preparing a paper, or a portfolio. You would be readying yourself for the test. Since #clmooc was a collaboration, you never needed to ask permission to use the restroom or beg forgiveness for missing a day. You learned and helped others learn through sharing creative work, critical thinking and collaborative ideas.

Found Alphabet by Janis Selby Jones

Avoid the temptation to reflect on your #clmooc experience as a course.

If you were educated on Earth, you have background in course-like learning and you might feel the temptation to reflect on your making and learning as would suit a course. In the same way, just as you are susceptible to Earth’s gravity, you are susceptible to associate learning with courses. Instead, consider your learning in a way you might consider your learning after a camping trip, after a visit to the museum, or after a dance that leaves you sweaty, laughing, and looking for a drink of water.

What are some ways your experience in #clmooc has helped you expand your personal learning network?

What are some ways this experience in #clmooc has impacted your thinking about making, composing, and learning?

What are some ways this experience has helped you reflect on your work as an educator?

What are some ways this experience has helped you reflect on how you play? Imagine your new identity as a connected learner into the near, middle, and far future.

What are some quotes and insights from others in the #clmooc that have reverberated and remained with you this summer? Feel free to add those words to the collaborative document that Jane Raissle has created.

A collected quote from CLMOOC

Reflect on #clmooc and its digital spaces as an artifact of collaboration.

Re-read, notice, and make notes on the distributed artifact we authored as a #clmooc community.
The individual work done by participants in different places, at different times, using different tools has left us with a distributed text. The chapters, vignettes, arguments, and the glossary of this text lie in social streams hosted by Google+, Twitter, blog platforms, and Facebook, just to name a few. The authors of our text chipped in however they chose and in the ways they were able. Maybe the digital text we created is a mess. Maybe it is a marvel. It probably looks a little like the Internet itself. What do you make of this text? What might people who pick it up in a month make with it?

What would you format in bold in our distributed text? What should everyone read twice, thrice, and then tell their children? What refrains of the summer will you be thinking about as the seasons change and school begins again?

What will you photocopy from our text and take back to work with you and share with colleagues?

Which parts of this text touched a nerve, compelling you to grab your highlighter and scrawl in the margins when you should have been sleeping, gardening or walking the dog?

How will you take what you have become at #clmooc and imagine it into your future as a connected learner and as an educator?

Stay Connected

Just as all of us spent the summer in the #clmooc as part of a larger community, so too is the Making Learning Connected MOOC part of something larger. While our formal Make Cycles are now coming to a calendar-close, the spirit of the Make will remain live and vibrant in places like Educator Innovator.

Educator Innovator, powered by the National Writing Project, as many of you know sponsored CLMOOC. What you might not know is that Educator Innovator is both a network of networks—EI has lots of great partners, like Maker Education, Edutopia, Institute of Play, Mozilla’s Webmaker, and many more—and an online community of educators like yourselves who are interested in the intersection of play, learning and creativity. Educator Innovator has great resources, like blog posts and webinars, that help you stay abreast of the latest opportunities from partners who are interested in engaging educators, both formal and informal, in the kinds of production-centered, interest-driven, Connected Learning work represented through events like CLMOOC.

So consider subscribing to Educator Innovator by visiting educatorinnovator.org.

Ways to Share

Here are some handy links that might help you with your sharing and connecting:

• In Google Plus, you should join our Making Learning Connected Community;
• On Twitter, we encourage you to follow and use the #clmooc hashtag this summer;
• You can submit your blog to the Making Learning Connected Blog Hub, which will collect and showcase blog posts from participants;
• We also encourage you to share your makes in the CLMOOC Make Bank;
• Last but not least, you can post and cross-post at NWP Digital Is.

Live Events

Join our Make With Me live broadcast on Tuesday, July 29th, at 7 p.m. Eastern live streamed with a synchronous chat here at CLMOOC. This session will also be recorded so you can watch the archive later.

And on Thursday, July 31st at 7p.m. Eastern come together for the #clmoocTwitter Chat where we will focus on Connected Learning now and into the future!

Need more information?

• Check out our Frequently Asked Questions page
• Explore the National Writing Project’s Digital Is site for ways to connect digital media with writing and learning.
• Reach out to us with questions or suggestions in the G+ Community.
• Consider also that you might want to Make a Case this time around!

Finally …

Embrace the ethos of being a maker and make connections with us in the Making Learning Connected Collaboration and with others who share your interests and passions. Give yourself permission to do something new. Give yourself permission to linger on something old. Give yourself permission to do something fun. Play. Tinker. Make. And finally, give yourself permission to fail and to succeed ─ knowing that we’ll clap loudly for you either way.

Story by Mary Ellen B.

On behalf of the Hudson Valley Writing Project, we want to thank you all for inviting us to share in this wonderful experience of making 5-Image Stories. We were blown away by how everyone took our simple idea and truly made it their own in such creative and touching ways. Our goal was to plant a seed in everyone’s mind about a way to inspire students while fostering creativity through looking at composing in a fresh way. By looking at the various ways that stories were told, we think you got the idea.

Though we did not really know what we were getting ourselves into, it was definitely an enjoyable and enlightening experience. The power of a connected community of learners is always something that continues to be impressive. The posts to Google+, additions to the Make Bank and the conversations in the Hangout and in the Twitter Chat pushed our thinking not only around the idea of the 5-Image Story and what it means to compose and communicate with images, but also what it might mean for teachers in real classrooms around the world.

Story image by Larry Hewett

We started this week with an idea that was not original. The work of the 5-Image Story stands on the shoulders of many people that have experimented with the concept both in and out of the classroom. From past experiences with both teachers and students, we at the HVWP felt that it would be an interesting approach to bring to the CLMOOC and we were anxious to see how the community would push the idea and shape it into new directions. Of course, the conversations and participation this week were beyond our wildest dreams.

Early on in the week Kevin Hodgson, suggested the 5-Emoji Story which, in his words, was “Harder than you would think.” This type of composing, seemingly simple but in fact complex, no doubt left many a CLMOOCer puzzling over the funky smileys built into the alternative keyboards of their various devices. Definitely check out #clmooc on Twitter and the G+ community for some of the work Kevin inspired.

Along with the thriving posts on G+, the Make Bank, and thoughtful reflections in the Blog Hub, we were thrilled to be able to share some of the work with 5-Image Stories that we have been doing here at HVWP during the Tuesday night Make with Me. It was encouraging to see how open teachers were to bring this not just to an ELA classroom, but across many different content areas.

Monica Tienda joined us fresh from a math conference and discussed how she saw 5-Image Stories integrating with the “deep math” work she had been doing over the past three weeks. The content area connections were fast and furious as Andrea Tejedor and Bonnie Kaplan shared with us how a variety of content teachers in her school had used 5-Image Stories in both Science in Social Studies. The Make with Me really got us thinking about the 5-Image Story as being capable of so much more than just a pre-writing tool. In another great conversation, participants discussed how technology would not be a breaking point and how this work could easily represent itself in analog form (and, in some cases, maybe it should).

As with any group of smart, motivated people, the CLMOOC continued to push our thinking during the Twitter Chat on Thursday as participants debated whether it was better to introduce the 5-Image Story by giving students images or to have them create their own. We also explored the various timings of how to include this work in the curriculum. For some people it was clear that this strategy would work well early in a unit or content area of study to give students an easy entry point into new content. For others, it made sense to apply the 5-Image Story as a processing tool later on in the area of study.  We think the group as a whole would agree that as with any powerful strategy, the implementation is up to the teacher to find where and how it would work best for a given curriculum with a particular set of students.

Storybird story begun by Kevin Hodgson.

The week was a barrage of images, apps, websites, tools, ideas, mixing, making and remaking that offers not a final idea but a place to start to explore a practice that could take many different directions and look very different in various contexts.

This week’s theme got us to explore what it means to compose visually within constraints that help us examine our work critically, as well as what it means to be creative through necessity. It caused us to plan, compose, rethink, and use ingenuity. It opened us up to a variety of tools like Tapestry (though sadly we will have to find a replacement), Steller, Storehouse, Storybird, and Google Slides and in a pinch, good ole Microsoft Word.

It was exciting to have the educators in our current summer institute benefit from this work as they got messy with the same 5-Image Stories in a workshop, working first collaboratively and then on their own digital pieces. Probably the greatest challenge for the group was finding the right tool to use, given the fact that “free” apps often have strings attached. But that messiness of this work is an essential part of the process. Ultimately everyone created something and thought deeply about how this strategy might be used in their classrooms.

HVWP Summer Institute participants creating collaborative 5-Image Stories.

More collaboration!

Many of the collaborators in the CLMOOC community played around with how to tell their story from Mary Ellen B’s beautiful collage to Larry Hewett’s powerful personal narrative told through slides. Kevin Hodgson and Michelle Stein showed us how we might have a collaborative effort in making a storybook by each contributing a connected five images.

However, the idea of using images and thinking about their relationship to composition and communication is a lens that feels like it will be useful in many different ways as we prepare to return to our classrooms and other teaching/learning contexts in the coming weeks. Our hope is that we will all feel a bit more confident when working with images, composition and writing with their students having walked the walk ourselves.

For reflecting further on Make Cycle #6 we invite you to elaborate on your experiences with the 5-Image Story in longer form. Consider a blog post to explore the idea about the power of images and how that can inspire writing.  We would love to hear about your experiences this week with the 5-Image Story and how you do or might use this great strategy in your classrooms, your Connected Learning context, and/or in your role as an instructional leader.

What’s Ahead

Keep making and sharing your stories and elaborations! The final cycle—the Connected Learning Reflections and Connections week—will kick off on Monday. We will reflect upon and celebrate all the connections, community and meaning we’ve been making together here at CLMOOC while asking ourselves how we will take the summer goodness forward into our other learning contexts. So stay tuned!

“Thank You” 5 image Story photo credits: Jannene, Jeramey. “Thanks for Heading to the Border.”; Slaughter, Daniel. “Thank You Trash…”; Collins, Jen. “Thank You.”; Morris, Russ. “Thank You *.”; Woolaver, Avard. “Thank You.”

Thank you for having us this week and with that we leave you with 5 Images of Thanks from the HVWP!

Jack, Bonnie, Marc & Andrea

Welcome to Make Cycle #6 in the Making Learning Connected collaboration! Let’s give the facilitators from the Maker Jawn Initiative from the Free Library of Philadelphia a big hand for inspiring us to push the boundaries of storytelling through the use of light. The variety of voices, approaches, and media is a testament to our collective creativity, and we look forward to continuing to make, share, reflect, and explore Connected Learning with you.

For this sixth Make Cycle, we will think about the power of images, and what it means to compose a text visually.

Image from http://www.newpaltz.edu/hvwp/

When composing with images, we are forced to think critically in a way that focuses us on our intent in order to get a clear message across. To this end, we will focus our explorations on the concept of a 5-Image Story. According to Wesley Fryer’s “Mapping Media to the Common Core,” a 5-Image Story is a “collection of five images which tell a story of some kind without using supplementary text, audio or video. The five photos should ‘stand alone’ as a story.”

BUT, feel free to break Wesley’s rules and add titles and captions to your stories.

At the Hudson Valley Writing Project, we have been playing with the 5-Image Story since Bonnie Kaplan, Co-Director, and Jack Zangerle, 8th grade ELA (Summer Institute ‘10) at Dover Middle School, co-facilitated an innovative project. The 5-Image Story seemed to be a perfect way to begin the storytelling process with a small group of tech kids. Here’s an example of a basic procedural 5-Image Story from one of the 8th grade students:

Used with permission from Jack Zangerle

More recently, Andrea Tejedor,(SI ‘13) Director of Technology at Highland Falls School District collaborating with Bonnie, brought 5-Image Stories to her teacher team. Here’s a video of teachers sharing and Paul’s 5-Image Story Project with a rubric.

Completing our facilitation team, Marc Schroeder (SI ‘09), 6th-8th grade ESL teacher at Meadow Hill School, Newburgh, is ready for any digital challenge and this summer is no exception. He has joined our HVWP documenting team, capturing our Young Writers Programs in the Hudson Valley. Good thing he’s off this week.

As you choose and produce your makes this week, we invite you to think about these questions:

• What does it mean to compose a visual text?
• What happens when makers push the boundaries of a 5-Image Story and approach the creation of a 5- Image Story from different angles?
• What might this process mean for classroom practices as teachers prepare for the new school year?
• How can teachers evolve this type of composition to move beyond the definition of a 5-Image Story and move into other media rich creations?

Please continue to share your “makes” this week in our Google Plus community and in the Make Bank, and think about branching off into your own spaces and your own networks─pursuing opportunities to connect with others around shared purposes and interests. There are no defined time limits to any of the Make Cycles we present this summer. If you are curious about what a typical cycle will look like, you can read through the post about Make Cycles.

Remember that this MOOC experience is about you. We are glad that you are here, and you are welcome to blog and bolt, make and leave, think and reflect, read and remake, or lurk and learn. Participate as much or as little as you like. You’re ok!

Make with Me!

For this Make Cycle, an easy way in might be to grab your phone and head out into the world. Look for the places in your life where small stories take place. Maybe you are sitting on a blanket to enjoy a picnic in the sunshine and notice an ant taking crumbs from the blanket back to his ant hill. Snap a picture of the ant approaching the crumbs, one as he stops to take the crumb, one as he walks to his ant hill, another as he enters the hole and a final picture after he has descended home with his new meal. Bang! It’s the story of Anthony the Ant’s Afternoon Picnic.

OR: You may also choose to make an instructional 5-Image Story and use images to show how to do something through illustrating steps. If you really want to dig in, you may choose to carefully stage images to tell a story that conveys a message that you feel is important to share.

If you are really ready to take it up ANOTHER NOTCH, then you might consider using the images you take or collect and mix in other media such as music, video, narration and other effects to bring your story to life even further.

Still need help? Try starting with these five photos. Tell your story with them. Change the sequence, add a title and captions. Why not move them to TAPESTRY, free on the iphone and android phones, just for the fun of it. There are many ways you might develop your 5-Image Story.

Check Out These Resources

If you need images other than your own:

Flickr – If you don’t have your own photographs, this site has many beautiful photographs that you can weave together. Just remember what we always tell our students and be sure to cite your sources.

The Library of Congress – Another great place to find photographs if you don’t have your own. Most of these are in the public domain, but you still should use citations when possible.

Visit the following sites for additional resources about the 5-Image Story and a list of Cool Tools to Create and publish your voice through images:

• Tapestry
• The 5-Image Story 
• Publishing 2020
• And here’s a great article providing tips to help you create a great 5-Image Story.

Places to Share

Here are some handy links that might help you with your sharing and connecting:

• In Google Plus, you should join our Making Learning Connected Community;
• On Twitter, we encourage you to follow and use the #clmooc hashtag this summer;
• You can submit your blog to the Making Learning Connected Blog Hub, which will collect and showcase blog posts from participants;
• We also encourage you to share your makes in the CLMOOC Make Bank.

Live Events

• Join our Make With Me live broadcast with chat on Tuesday, July 22nd, at 7 p.m. Eastern live streamed with a synchronous chat here at CLMOOC. This session will also be recorded so you can watch the archive later.
• We will be hosting a Twitter Chat for Make Cycle #6 on Thursday, July 24th from 7-8 p.m. Eastern with the #clmooc hashtag

Need More Information?

• Check out our Frequently Asked Questions page
• Explore the National Writing Project’s Digital Is site for ways to connect digital media with writing and learning.
• Reach out to us with questions or suggestions in the G+ Community.
• Consider also that you might want to Make a Case this time around!

Finally …

Embrace the ethos of being a maker and make connections with us in the Making Learning Connected Collaboration and with others who share your interests and passions. Give yourself permission to do something new. Give yourself permission to linger on something old. Give yourself permission to do something fun. And finally, give yourself permission to fail and to succeed ─ knowing that we’ll clap for you either way.

All the best,

Bonnie Kaplan, Marc Schroeder, Andrea Tejedor, and Jack Zangerle, Hudson Valley Writing Project.

Thanks on behalf of Maker Jawn for an amazing “Storytelling with Light” Make Cycle! We were so impressed with your projects and thought-provoking questions, and hope that you incorporate some of these ideas and materials into your personal and professional practice. Our goal in designing the Make Cycle this week was to challenge us all to expand our composing materials beyond words into the physical world. We suggested “light” as a medium, but we’re excited to keep expanding our making to other non-traditional materials like sound, recycled materials (trash!) and movable robotics as a medium to inspire and tell stories.

Continue reading…

Light Projection Box

Welcome to the fifth Make Cycle in the 2014 Making Learning Connected Collaboration! We are the Maker Jawn Initiative from the Free Library of Philadelphia and are excited to introduce ourselves and learn with this community! This week we’re inviting you to think about how you can tell a story using light. We thought this would make a great transition from last week’s Hack Your Writing Make Cycle. We’ll be deepening the conversation by moving it towards using light in general, taking projects out of our notebooks, and connecting with stories in our wider communities.

Continue reading…

Transformed Book by Larry Hewett; Making Learning Connected 2014

A heartfelt thank you to everyone in the CLMOOC community for your insightful contributions to this week’s “Hack Your Writing!” Make Cycle. We were so impressed with the variety of works posted in the G+ community, on Twitter, and to the Make Bank—we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of what it means to hack (your writing) in this (analogue to) digital age.

This week’s theme led to a number of folks questioning the definition of hacking and what it means to hack one’s writing. Susan Watson pondered this key question while hacking her daughter’s video and Terry Elliot inquired on Google+ “Does putting my writing into an electrified notebook with circuits that power bells, LED’s and whistles constitute a hack? Inquiring minds want to know.” Hacking literally went “viral” this week courtesy of Amy Cody Clancy’s post on visual poetry. Kim Douillard encouraged us to consider what affordances and constraints hacking brings to the curriculum, giving pause to reflect on how the notion of hacking can be applied to our classroom settings, while Shannon Falkner drew inspiration from everyday mobile communication by hacking her text messages. Larry Hewett demonstrated his captivating papercraft hack by literally carving a sculpture from a traditional text. His work is a testament to the mantra that meaningful hacking of writing is not always digital.

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Welcome to Make Cycle #4 in the Making Learning Connected collaboration! Let’s give facilitators Joe Dillon and Terry Elliott a big hand for their dynamic engagement with gaming. As we continue to discover new ways to learn through play and passion, we continue our focus on the Connected Learning design principles, exploring the connections we make in open networks around shared purposes.

Image by Jenny Spadafora on Flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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CC BY Joe Dillon

Object of Play

This game you’ve just unboxed this cycle is a game about reflecting. Scour your experience from Make Cycle 3’s exploration of games in learning in order to reflect on what you’ve played, learned and decided. Decided? Yes, decided. What did you decide this week about yourself, about games, about learning, and about play?

James Carse has suggested in his seminal work on games and play that there are two types of game and game play, finite and infinite. Reflection is an infinite game. When we pool our reflections by laying them out around the unfolded board of our digital spaces in CLMOOC, those reflections can help us a sharpen our shared purpose.

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