hello fcccapit! Your questions are really interesting, simply because they are extremely important ones that affect our day to day teaching lives.
The second one is the easiest to answer and so I will do this first.
I highly recommend
TappedIn The community hops! It has events going on all the time in every K-12 subject area including art and physical education. I recommend that you start with the virtual tour that introduces you to Tapped In. They call these tours tips and tricks. They are held twice a week (I think Wednesday and Saturdays) BJB is the tour guide and I recommend her highly. Tapped In is a synchronous chat (through text) community and people type words to each other. They don't have voice or video - but ... it is worth a few visits.
Okay now for the more difficult question
What qualities would make a cirtual community for k-12 teachers excellent
wellllll.... I used to teach and now I teach teachers, coaches, professors to transfer their skills to the online environment through
knowplace You may be a bit surprised at what I will say:
[ulist][*]be able to say "i don't know" [/*]
In the online world the technology changes so very quickly!!It is impossible for one person to keep up with all the changes. Sometimes your students know more than you do about something. Learn to encourage them to share what they know with the other students and to take the lead and to teach you. Let the other students see that you are willing to learn just like they are.
[*]Be flexible [/*]
Students introduce different things, encourage them to go off and investigate and share what they have learned with the group.
[*]Mistakes are our friends [/*]
Create a safe and healthy discussion environment that encourages them to make mistakes in their posts, uploading images etc so that they can learn how to talk and do things in your course
[*]be prepared to keep learning [/*]
Once again - the technology! it changes quickly! new versions come out all the time, new tools are invented to do things "better". Do NOT get into teaching online unless you are prepared to be a life long learner.
[/ulist]
If you are interested we have free and open weekends @knowplace This weekend we have one on blogs but the one that starts Friday June 02, - 04 gives people an opportunity to ask questions about working online. I don't know which time zone you are in, but our open weekends open up to our members at 12:00 noon PDT.
if you are interested in joining us, come to
http://knowplace.caand create a login account for yourself (it's free) and then go to the open weekends area and register for our open weekends mailing list.
If this is too complex - just write to me.. I am often online and happy to assist: flong@knowplace.ca :tongue;