Abstract:

The paper will present a research on use of digital technologies to support teachers and teacher educators. First, we will discuss briefly recent studies, related to teacher educators (TE), who shows TE confusion among the sea of learning resources, published in various specialized digital libraries or repositories. TE share their need for an environment that easily adapts to their profiles while they save time when searching for educational resources and ensure effective detection of specific ones. The trainers would also like to easily view and share experience with other teacher educators, and easy to organize their own continuing education.
Next, the paper will present the Share.TEC innovative portal for teacher educators all over the Europe, developed within the project under the eContentPlus program, which came to meet TE requirements for quality and efficient preparation and implementation of teacher training. Completing its main goal to build an advanced user-focused system that aggregates metadata describing digital resources related to teacher educators all over the Europe, the Share.TEC system provides access to educational resources with high quality related to TE domain. The main areas of the portal: TAKE, USE and GIVE, related to locating resources, using resources and uploading own resources, adding annotations and ratings will be presented shortly.
The paper will focus on research for evaluating the Share.TEC portal interface and usability if they meet the teachers’ and teachers educators’ requirements and proving that Share.TEC portal is an innovative solution for teacher educators.
It will present the methodology of testing and validation of Share.TEC with teachers and teacher educators. First, the methodology will be described as a combination of Think Aloud Protocol (TAP) and a questionnaire. Next, the TAP (a method developed by Clayton Lewis to gather a verbal report during usability testing) used to validate whether the Share.TEC portal meets the suggested by users requirements, will be described. The questions in the survey for collecting the feedback will be presented.
The activities, followed the TAP session, including observers discussions with participants and users fill-in of the questionnaire, will be analyzed.
On next place, the paper will present the process of validation and testing performed in Bulgaria as part of the larger evaluation done in parallel in several European countries. The participants involved will be introduced, according their professional background, age, and sex.
The data collected during the testing and validation will be analyzed. It will be shown as result that the system is really useful, innovative tool for the teacher educators. Not only because of the easy way to use the adaptable interface, but mainly because, as teacher educators shared, it provides shorter way for them to the needed resources. In addition, we will shown that the participants were also impressed to find out more about the pedagogical context of the resources, as well as by the annotations and comments provided by other colleagues who have been experienced with the found resources.
Finally, the paper will present that testing and validation done prove that Share.TEC portal provides appropriate learning and social environment for sharing not only digital resources for teachers’ education, but also knowledge and experience for self-development and European teacher education community building.

Keywords:

Teachers education portal, metadata repository, validation.