• Reviewed three online community sites (education-world.com, teachernet.com, and talkcity.com)--looking for any attributes of online commuinity
• Reviewed 8 regional T/TAC newsletters
• Conformed the schedules of interviewing administrators, special education teachers, and JMU T/TAC member
• Generated interview protocols

Feb.6, 2001

• Overviewed technical needs for T/TAC online
• Discussed learning objects
• Reviewed the ideas and suggestions of AT task force regarding to Webshops, Quick Tours, and Hot Topics with Dr. Brenda Bannan-Ritland and Dr. Kay Mc Carron
• Reviewed the interview protocols of administrators, special education teachers, and JMU T/TAC members
• Discussed the possibility of observing/participating AT conference held at GMU next week (Feb. 16, 17)
• Considered developing T/TAC online infrastructure as a first preference in this semester
• Brainstormed an external mission statement of T/TAC online website to help other people understand the purpose of T/TAC online

Since last week, The team tried to find out the useful attributes of online community based upon reviewing different online comminity websites. This activity gave us a clear design idea for developing T/TAC online community website. We discussed what we should try and what we should not try to design an online community. We found additional features/attributes that may be helpful for the T/TAC online website: a topic of good/bad days in the discussion boards, an idea of referring the website to friends (creating an click button to send an email automatically), very clear category/chunking of topics, and creating parents corner or subgroup corner. Also, we thought about tracking of the users (any software for tracking mechanism?).

Each team member reviewed 1 or 2 regional T/TAC newsletters and discussed what kinds of topics they covered, How they can get the information of the topics, how each regional newsletter differs one another, how they are organized, etc..

The team reviewed the ideas or suggestions of AT task force regarding to T/TAC online. They had a fairly strong understanding of how T/TAC online is formatted. Our biggest concern was the content of Webshop. AT task force wanted various topics and well-developed content, however, we were still not sure how we can get those resources and make them interactive (we believe most resources are power point presentations or hard copies). We concluded that we need to focus on developing T/TAC online infrastructure and make it functional in this semester, and we will select few sample pieces from resources to create the content of T/TAC online.

Next Step:

1. Interviewing administrators (2/8), special education teachers (2/8), and JMU T/TAC member (2/7)
2. Observing and participating AT conference in next week
3. Applying 'Design Guidelines Including Math and Science Solution' into T/TAC online website as a design guideline