Professional Online Community

The Professional online community that I chose to join, was the National Art Education Association (NAEA) for Secondary Teachers, a social network specifically for secondary art teachers. This particular social network is called a "Ning," which is more or less a portal to a variety of mini-social networks. The user, like myself, signs up and creates their own profile and then can choose to join any of the thousands of user-created networks, groups, blogs, and forums.

After signing up to join the NAEA Ning, I created my own blog. My hopes were to get feedback from other art teachers that would be helpful in upcoming lessons. I wanted to find new ideas for assessment, teaching strategies, resources and lesson plans. However, I was disappointed that I did not receive very many responses to my post and some of the posts may have been automated. There were a few comments that were helpful, but were often posted long after I had taught the lesson. Even though some of the comments I received proved to be useful, I quickly lost interest in blogging due to the response time. I think that you would have to patient and not expect to get immediate feedback.

The part of the Ning Network that I liked the most was the online gallery of student work. This photo gallery was a great way to search for project ideas and to see what is happening in art rooms across the nation. I also found some useful posts from other blogs and from different forums that had helpful insight into the world of teaching art. I may continue to use this network in the future due to the online gallery and forums. However, I now realize that I will have to be more patient in order to find or receive useful information.