Friday is a good day. It’s a day to relax a little bit and look forward to the weekend, whether you work weekends or not. So finding five things on a Friday is a good habit to develop. These could focus on friends, food, celebration or serendipity. Finding five real or digital gems is sometimes easy but sometimes it takes a while to stumble around until you find five of something. It’s part of your reflective practice.

So here’s my FIND FIVE for this FRIDAY. These are some of the resources and connections that I’ve made in digital spaces this week.

1. Thinking about systems by Linda Booth Sweeney: As I explored systems, design and complexity, this site kept me coming back to check, reference, rethink and connect to other ideas and people’s writing.
2. ReMEDIAting tires – this is where I collected some interesting connections and ideas about how to repurpose tires. This resulted from a few posts in the CLMOOC Google Community referencing Piles of Stuff and Piles of Tyres. As I result of this divergence from systems thinking, I created a motivational poster for those feeling tired or deflated.
3. The Digital Learning Horoscope came across my twitter stream. Anything from Renee Hobbs catches my attention, so this one I investigated further. After I completed the horoscope I shared it out to several connections in my PLN (Kevin, Kendra, Dina). This also caught the attention of Renee Hobbs who retweeted and starred the shared results.
4. I’ve been trying to work on research and writing on the topic of feedback in online learning spaces but kept getting pulled into interesting digital conversations. There’s been a Self Regulation Summer Symposium happening in Ontario featuring the research by Stuart Shanker.  The CEA/ACE article Self Regulation: Calm, Alert and Learning focuses on the growing awareness in education of the importance of self regulation in mastering complex skills and concepts. Then Aviva Dunsinger blogged that self regulation was Not Just for Kindergarten. This whole topic connected to Amy Cody Clancy’s share Through Your Child’s Eyes from Understood.org. This site increases awareness of learning and attention issues with simulations to build understanding. This highlighted my own lack of self regulation in staying focused and getting my work done, despite the interesting connections.
5. Finally, fun has been encouraged this week. My fun time has been overtaken with the PanAm Games being held in Toronto. It amazes me that these athletes are having so much fun and the community is sharing this fun as a result of the games. So my fun contribution came after an interview where an inspirational quote was mentioned. I quickly returned to my IMGFLIP site and crafted Butterflies, then tweeted it out to the PanAm hashtags.

Five, fun, fulfilling ways I’ve learned, connected and created this week.

What are yours?