FAQ
In this section, you can read frequently asked questions about the Share.TEC project.
If you have a question that is not listed here, please contact Project Coordinator at sharetec@itd.cnr.it
What is the Share.TEC system?
A platform granting unified access to digital resources across Europe that specifically target the domain of Teacher Education (TE).
How does Share.TEC differ from existing educational repositories?
In two ways mainly:
1. its target - Share.TEC is dedicated to the TE field in Europe, and portrays digital content aimed at all levels of teacher education including Initial Teacher Education (ITE), induction into the profession and career-long Continuing Professional Development (CPD).
2. its breadth - Share.TEC connects a number of different TE-related repositories and offers a unified access point and query mechanism that adapts to the user’s specific language and context. By providing interoperability between these repositories, Share.TEC broadens reusability perspectives across Europe. This is partly achieved via a model that helps overcome language barriers and captures pedagogical and experiential descriptions of TE relevant resources.
Who are the main target users of Share.TEC?
First and foremost they are teacher educators, practising teachers (for CPD), and student teachers. As seekers of TE content, these users would come to Share.TEC to satisfy different needs, e.g.:
-I’m a teacher trainer and I’m looking for material for next week’s class with my foreign language trainees. We’re just starting a module on interactive whiteboards (IWB) and how they can enhance classroom practice.
-I’m a maths teacher and I want to find out how maths teachers elsewhere are using IWBs in the classroom (they’ve been using them for years in other countries, perhaps they’ve got some good ideas).
-Help, I’m a teacher doing my induction. The school where I’m placed has IWBs and my mentor really wants me to use them. Where should I start?
These are just a few examples. Share.TEC addresses the needs of users such as these with a multiplicity of solutions so as to provide a best-fit response. Publishers and content/service providers are also core users. Share.TEC meets their fundamental need to make their TE contents more visible and accessible to a much wider audience. Individual TE practitioners will also have the opportunity to describe and share their contents, as well as to enrich existing content descriptions with comments based on their (re)use experience.
As a user, what can I find in Share.TEC?
The short answer is highly relevant, understandable descriptions of digital resources that specifically address the teacher education field, together with links to those resources. The Share.TEC project already brings together a critical mass of proven TE contents provided by its partners. This include texts, multimedia presentations, videos, audio recordings - media of all kinds. This will be incremented by resources from other TE institutions, publishers and content providers, and from individual TE practitioners, including both open access and commercial content. Technically speaking, the content items themselves remain in their “home” location, be it the university TE repository, YouTube, SlideShare, Merlot, etc, while the Share.TEC system manages the special descriptions and links.
And what won’t I find?
Share.TEC is a system that brokers TE-oriented resources, not “educational resources” in general. In other words, Share.TEC won’t help you find stuff destined for use directly with school students. For example, you won’t find a “naked” content item dealing with primary school geography, however good it may be (there are already lots of great places where you can find useful stuff like that). However, if that same content item forms part of a lesson plan that “talks” to a teacher, that captures teachers’ practice and stimulates methodological reflection, then that’s something you could find in Share.TEC. Moving a little further back from the “chalk face”, we can imagine a module developed by a teacher trainer that helps trainee teachers understand how best to use digital resources in the classroom - a module that draws on that same lesson plan as an example of good (or bad) practice – well that’s a bull’s-eye, it’s exactly the sort of resource that Share.TEC will help users find and reuse.
Can I add a description of my own TE resources in Share.TEC?
Yes, and a special user-friendly support tool called the Resource Integration Companion Kit, or RICK for short, will help you to do so.
And can I get in contact with other users?
Yes, sharing experience with peers about (re)using digital content in TE is of fundamental importance in Share.TEC.
So what contribution will Share.TEC make to the TE field across Europe?
Teacher educators will have the chance to discover resources and approaches that would otherwise remain hidden to them and their communities. This will help to enhance both individual practice and also to enrich established TE communities through sharing on a broader scale. Share.TEC is well integrated both with national TE structures and with European TE initiatives. More wide-scale sharing of content and knowledge in TE across Europe should help foster a stronger European identity in the field and provide support for teacher and teacher educator mobility.
How does Share.TEC promote the reuse of digital content in TE?
Share.TEC emphasizes pedagogical description of digital content and facilitates understanding of that description across different contexts. It adopts a metadata model that explicitly represents teacher-oriented resources such as lesson plans, pedagogical design patterns, IMS-LD scripts etc. What’s more, the Share.TEC system engages user community expertise through social tagging, folksonomies, context-sensitive experiential annotations, recommendations, etc.
How does Share.TEC capture and relate the key features of TE, a field that varies greatly across Europe?
The semantic core at the heart of the Share.TEC system is a Teacher Education Ontology (TEO), a formal knowledge representation developed as part of the project and integrating other existing knowledge taxonomies. TEO describes the specifics of the TE field in Europe, capturing and relating relevant concepts. The integration of this semantic layer in the system is key to Share.TEC’s ambitions of meeting the needs of users operating in diverse TE contexts; TEO represents both TE concepts and their relations, mapping them across cultural and language boundaries. TEO is a cornerstone for Share.TEC’s Common Metadata Model (CMM), which provides a unified language for describing TE resources and allows for interoperability with a diverse range of repositories. TEO also plays an essential part in personalising the system to match the user’s individual profile.
What does Share.TEC seek to achieve in the area of multiculturalism?
The multicultural dimension of Share.TEC concerns linguistic pluralism and the heterogeneity of TE-related contexts. These areas are addressed for the specific purpose of helping users to locate and reuse digital resources. As a project, Share.TEC does not have an explicit mission to educate teachers about diversity and inclusive practices in the classroom. That said, resources about these important issues in Teacher Education could - and should - appear in the Share.TEC system.
Does Share.TEC represent Teacher Education competencies in some way?
Yes, it makes allowance for competencies. TEO features a taxonomy of general skills that are represented by type and level. It relates this taxonomy to representation of content domains. The result in Share.TEC is that when a digital resource is described in terms of both the topics and the skills it addresses, a TE competency element can be generated. This elements may well prove useful to those Share.TEC users who are used to approaching TE in terms of competencies.
How does Share.TEC address current and future needs in TE?
Despite the push for digital-led innovation in Europe’s education systems, there are currently no services at European level for locating and sharing TE-specific digital content, much less for sharing the experience gained in the use of those resources. So Share.TEC is addressing this primary need by building a unified interface to initiatives in different countries; it is seeking to bring a more networked, pan-European dimension to what has hitherto been a field firmly entrenched at local level.
As to the future, Share.TEC services and infrastructure have the flexible to be easily adapted to the requirements of a rapidly changing world: the system’s foundation structures (TEO, CMM) can be easily modified to reflect change and to underpin improvement in services so as to encompass users’ emerging desiderata.
Editor: Erik Axdorph
Source: Share.TEC
Updated: 10/21/09