Content Portals in Teacher Education and Jewish Education

1. Content Portals in Teacher Education and Jewish Education Reuven Werber (reuw@macam.ac.il) Penny Barsimantov (pennyb@macam.ac.il) The International Channel, The MOFET Institute

2. In 2008, the International Channel of The MOFET Institute launched two academic content portals in English, to serve the community of teacher educators, researchers, policy makers, educators and other stakeholders around the world. This poster will present these two websites: The ITEC Portal – International Portal of Teacher Education The JTEC Portal – Jewish Portal of Teacher Education

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5. This overview will include: • What is a Content Portal • The Rationale of the ITEC and JTEC Portals • The Portals' Professional Staff and Readership • Content Processing and Editing • Content Search and Retrieval • Content Sharing and Update Possibilities

6. What is a Content Portal A content portal, sometimes referred to as a "vertical portal" or "vortal", is an online system (website) that selects and channels information items from the various sources and types of information. It then refines and displays them in a clear and user-friendly unified format. The portal interface saves time in accessing relevant resources by organizing, processing and disseminating the information. Thus, it serves as a type of onlinedatabase, helping the users locate information relevant to them.

7. The Rationale of the ITEC and JTEC Portals With the ongoing growth of resources and information, members of the education community are subjected to an "information overload". As a result, they are often unable to keep abreast of innovations, or gain an overview of the processes or directions that are developing in the field of teacher education. Both the ITEC and JTEC content portals provide a solution to this difficulty. Technologically, the portal combines different layers of information connected by a common display interface.

8. The ITEC Portal The ITEC Portal aims to lead global knowledge-sharing in the field of teacher education, otherwise referred to as teacher training. A repository of an academic and research nature, the ITEC Portal is based on a complete and systematic survey of the latest articles on teacher education and pedagogy from the leading international academic journals, most of which are peer-reviewed.

9. The JTEC Portal The objective of the JTEC Portal is to improve the flow of pedagogical knowledge and research in Jewish education by helping teacher educators, teachers, researchers, Jewish community leaders and other stakeholders keep abreast of the wealth of publications in the field.

10. Both ITEC and JTEC Portals are open and free for use. These portals serve as tools for "pushing information" in order to improve the ongoing flow of relevant academic and pedagogical information in the field of teaching and teacher education. This is done by gathering the leading materials in the field into one single database. In this way the Portals operate to try and lead global knowledge sharing and the creation of an international community of educators.

11. The Portals' Professional Staff Three professional teams work in cooperation : • A pedagogic team – responsible for the quality of the portals' contents. This team works in: establishing and maintaining editorial policy; content filtering; and pedagogical guidance. • Information specialists and content editors – responsible for: website operation; gathering content from various sources of information; processing, indexing and feeding the items into the portals' content system.

12. The IT and website engineering team – responsible for characterizing and designing the portal user interface and for developing its content and data systems. This team constantly upgrades the websites in order to meet developing technological needs by making them more functional and user friendly.

13. The Portals' Readership The portals were designed to serve as a tool to assist in research and as a platform for updating and sharing knowledge in the field of teacher education and teaching, for teacher educators and education researchers. By the very nature of its content, the JTEC Portal is also of interest to Jewish community leaders around the world who deal with formal and informal Jewish education for all age groups.

14. The Portals' Readership(cont.) Periodic checkups teach us that in addition to these users, k-12 educators, school principals, organizational and research institute officials, education mentors and students, all make use of the portals.

15. Thousands of visitors enter both portals every month, and are subscribed to receive periodical newsletters. Analysis of accumulated statistical data shows that portal visitors hail from over 150 countries. The following table shows the top 10 countries with the highest number of visitors to each portal.

17. Content Processing and Editing The ITEC Portal A systematic and continuous survey of the main, leading academic journals on teacher education and pedagogy, most of them peer reviewed, is conducted every two months: • Journal of Computing in Teacher Education • Teacher Education and Special Education • The Teacher Educator • Studying Teacher Education • Educational Action Research • European Educational Research Journal • Review of Educational Research • Journal of Research on Technology in Education • International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education • Harvard Educational Review • Curriculum Inquiry

18. TC Record • Journal of Teacher Education • Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education • European Journal of Teacher Education • Teaching and Teacher Education • Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education • Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education • Journal of Science Teacher Education • Journal of Education for Teaching • Journal of Technology and Teacher Education • Teaching Education • Action in Teacher Education • Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice • Mentoring & Tutoring • Educational Researcher • CITE • Teacher Development • Professional Development in Education

19. The listing of articles in each periodical is surveyed by the pedagogical team and is classified into the relevant sections of the portal. The articles are presented to the portal users either as abstracts or as reviewed articles which bring the main points and research results (depending on the accessibility we have to the full text of the article).

20. Content Processing and Editing The JTEC Portal A systematic overview of the leading Jewish education resources is carried out on a weekly basis. Some of the resources are academic, others are news related, and others are publications dealing with issues of informal education: • Professional Jewish education journals (i.e. JJE, JEL, IJJER). • Research reports and monographs of different organizations (i.e. AVI CHAI, JESNA, Brandeis University). • Publications and news releases of Jewish educational institutions worldwide.

21. 4. Blog posts of Jewish educators, researchers and administrators. • Jewish and Israeli press (i.e. JTA, Jewish Week. Forward, Jewish Standard, Haaretz, Jerusalem Post, Ynet). • Social networks – collection of "tweets", "likes", "shares" from Jewish education stakeholders with digital presence on Facebook, Twitter, etc. • Personal ties with Jewish education stakeholders and participation in conferences.

22. The JTEC portal emphasizes the following: • Relevant research on Jewish education, teacher education, etc. • Conferences and professional development sessions for educators and other stakeholders. • Educational resources and initiatives for educators and administrators (curricula, lesson plans, multimedia resources, online exhibitions, educational databases, webinars, podcasts, etc.) • Technology and innovation in Jewish education

23. Content Processing and Editing For Both Portals The information listings undergo a general mapping for content areas and are indexed by authors, keywords and countries. Additional activity, on Twitter and Facebook, allows enriching of the portals' contents by including additional references to items of interest and recent news in the areas of teacher education and education around the world.

24. Search and Content Retrieval • In order to browse through the contents, the user can perusethe list of main sections of each portal, which serves as the content map of the site. Each section represents a main category of content. • On the first page of each section the newest articles in the portal in this topic area are displayed. • In order to browse through all the older items in this category, enter the Section Archive

25. Section Archive Recent Section Abstracts

26. Search and Content Retrieval (Cont.) For searching specific content in the portal, users may choose either the simple or advanced search options. A simple search may be carried out in the search box appearing on the right side of the portal page, by typing the desired terms.

27. The search will be carried out in the following fields: • Item title • The item’s abstract (as appearing on the portal homepage or Section page) • Item keywords

28. For example, we conducted a search on the term "Educational Programs" At the top of the "Search Results“ page, the number of results which contain the search term, and an option to browse forward on the "Search Result" pages, will appear.

29. In order to retrieve items more accurately, it is best to use the "Advanced Search" form. In this form users can combine a search between keywords and authors, choose in which of the portal sections they want to search, limit the publication date, search only in item titles or search in the items’ full text. ITEC Advanced Search JTEC Advanced Search

30. Remember - the full text search gives full coverage, but may retrieve a great number of results. To deal with that, users can perform a Boolean search by using the operators AND, OR, NOT and parentheses ( ). In order to find a specific expression, one should write it in quotation marks.

31. In this example, we searched for the phrase "HigherEducation" in the Technology & Computers section. We limited the search to the publication years 2009-2010, and searched for the phrase only in the title or name of the item.

32. Search and Content Retrieval - Using Indexes In order to allow users to retrieve information in a more targeted manner, we indexed all the content items in the portal by authors, keywords and countries. The access to the indexes is on the bar on the right side of the portal page as well as in the "Advanced Search" Form - just choose the desired index and press the "Show" button.

33. All articles in the content items of the portal are attributed to their original authors. The items are indexed in the "Author Index" by family names of the authors. This index allows to search for items when the name of the researcher or author is known. ITEC Authors index JTEC Authors index

34. The number which appears next to each name in the index indicates the number of items in the portal by that author. In this example, we chose the letter "F" in order to get to the author Feiman-Nemser Sharon, who currently has 3 items in different sections of the portal.

35. Clicking on the author’s name leads to a results page which contains the links to these three items:

36. All items in the portals are tagged with keywords which define the main topics discussed in them. The keywords are assigned by our information specialists, taking into consideration the existing keywords assigned by the authors. The keyword index enables users to perform a targeted search for items according to their topics of interest. ITEC Keywords index JTEC Keywords index

37. The number which appears next to each keyword indicates the number of items which were tagged accordingly. In this example, we chose the letter "L“ to get to the topic "LearningActivities". Currently, there are 5 items in this category in the different sections of the portal.

38. Clicking on the keyword leads to a results page which contains the links to the relevant items.

39. It is important to note that there are many more items that deal with "Learning Activities" indirectly. These items will not receive this keyword, but can be retrieved through a simple or advanced text search.

40. In cases where an article or study describe teachers, students, institutions, curricula or educational policy in a specific country or region, that item will also be tagged with the name of that country (along with the regular keywords). The countries and regions index helps the users locate items by geographic segmentation and actually allows them to obtain a picture of research trends in the field of teaching and teacher education over the last few years in a specific country.

41. In this example, we chose “China“. Currently, there are 20 items which deal with that country in the different sections of the portal.

42. Clicking on the name of the country leads to a results page which specifies all links to all items in the portal which deal with China.

43. It is important to know that there is full connectivity between the indexes and the keywords, authors and countries within each item - there is no need to go to the index pages in order to see the desired items. (see next slide) In other words, the portal's navigation options allow the user, at every stage, to view other items dealing with similar topics or other articles by the same author. The user just has to click on the name or keyword which appears in the item presently being viewed.

45. There are a number of ways to keep up to date with new content which appears in the portals: • A Monthly Newsletter – Every month subscribers automatically receive a full listing of links to all new items which were added to the portal since the last newsletter. Subscription is free. ITEC Newsletter JTEC Newsletter

47. RSS Feeds – Each portal contains a general RSS feed for immediate updating of all the new contents in the website; RSS feeds for each content section; and an RSS feed for readers' comments.

48. Twitter – Updates about new Newsletters and other new content in the portals or related topics are also published on the Twitter pages of ITECand on the JTEC content editor’s Twitter page.

49. There are a number of ways to recommend and share content from the portals, thus (a) allowing the creation of an online professional discussion, and (b) updating colleagues about content that interests you and will be likely to interest them: • Comments – At the end of each item there is a form which allows you to write a comment on the article. The uniqueness of the portals' comment system is that readers' comments are also forwarded via email to the article's author, informing himabout any questions or comments written in response to the article. In this way we encourage the researchers, editors and authors to reply to the readers directly.

50. “Tweet" button – This button allows a quick and easy way for users to share an item with their followers on the social network and microblogging platform Twitter. 3. "Recommend" button – Over the last year, we are witnessing a growing use of the content share button in the Facebook social media network, known as the "Recommend" or "Like" button. A click on this button will allow the users to easily and quickly recommend and share an item from the portals with their community on Facebook.