SHARE.TEC: AN INNOVATIVE SOLUTION FOR TEACHER EDUCATORS Eliza Stefanova, Nikolina Nikolova, Elitsa Peltekova, Krassen Stefanov, Temenuzhka Zafirova-Malcheva, Eugenia Kovatcheva Sofia University „St. Kl. Ohridski” (BULGARIA) eliza@fmi.uni-sofia.bg, nnikolova@fmi.uni-sofia.bg, krassen@fmi.uni-sofia.bg, tzafirova@fmi.uni-sofia.bg, epk@fmi.uni-sofia.bg, peltekova@ucc.uni-sofia.bg Abstract The paper presents a research on use of digital technologies to support teachers and teacher educators. First, we discuss briefly recent studies, related to teacher educators, who show their confusion among the sea of learning resources, published in various specialized digital libraries or repositories. Next, the Share.TEC innovative portal for teacher educators all over the Europe is presented. It came to meet teachers’ and teachers educators’ requirements for quality and efficient preparation and implementation of teacher training through searching and sharing of high quality learning resources. The context of evaluation in Bulgaria of the Share.TEC portal interface and usability, as well as methodology used is introduced. On next place, the paper presents observations made during the process of validation done in parallel in several European countries. The data collected during the testing and validation are analysed and discussed. Finally, the conclusions about Share.TEC portal are given as an innovative solution for teacher educators. Keywords: Teacher education portal, metadata repository, validation. 1 INTRODUCTION The latest developments in information technologies have huge impact on education and training in schools, universities and companies. In order to meet these new challenges, teachers need new possibilities and new opportunities for their continuing professional qualification. This problem is considered as a key for a successful penetration of the new technologies phenomenon in the schools. Therefore, we need to design life-long teacher training strategy adapted to the new achievements in the technology enhanced learning research and the new learning theories. This strategy should stress on building social skills and competencies appropriate to work in a Web 2.0 based learning environment. This leads to the need to change and adapt the school curricula as well as the corresponding Teacher Education curricula. The current Web 2.0 phenomenon is focusing on sharing digital educational resources and discussing the best way of their use. This poses serious challenges to teachers’ trainers – to apply the style, which will be the most flexible and feasible for teachers, and to prepare them to be ready to teach and learn in the current digital society. One of the most promising approaches to overcome all these problems is based on the large use of Open Educational Resources, which demonstrate great potential to overcome demographic, economic, and geographic educational boundaries and to promote life-long learning and personalized learning. They are closely related with the Open Archives Initiative [1], aiming to achieve open access as the worldwide electronic distribution of peer-reviewed literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students and all other human beings. First declared in Budapest, and best known as Berlin Declaration, it gives rise of the new set of standards, which become the heart of the contemporary educational digital libraries. Building such digital libraries is among the main priorities of the European Commission, UNESCO and other international organizations. In order to explore the knowledge and resource sharing approach in the best possible way, current teachers need to know how to solve several general problems. Available resources are scattered and not structured well, which makes them difficult to find. There is significant lack of sufficient meta- information, which can help in the process of searching for the right information at the right time and at the right place. Proceedings of ICERI2011 Conference. 14th-16th November 2011, Madrid, Spain. ISBN: 978-84-615-3324-4 001679