Introduction Russian secondary education portal (
http://www.school.edu.ru), which was created about seven years ago in the framework of the federal target program
The Development of the Integrated Educational Environment, became one of the most widely used and promising educational internet resources for the secondary education system in Russia.
The portal is Winner of Government Prize in Education for 2008.
As a part of the federal educational portal network the portal is aimed to serve various users in the domain of the secondary education, among them are teachers, students and their parents, administration of the secondary education institutions, students and teachers of the pedagogical colleges, as well as all those who are interested in the educational issues and looking for new trends in education. The portal contains information that is related school curricula, out-of-school and extracurricular activities, rules and regulations on education, primarily issued by the Ministry of Science and Education of the Russian Federation. The portal also provides access to the information concerning various educational products and services, the news in the education area.
Russian secondary education portal consists of the following major sections:
- Directory of educational resources. The directory is constantly updating by educators with high competence in the subject. The directory structure is designed for the efficient navigation and search of resources. Resources can be filtered by target group, i.e. student, teacher, school manager, parent, by the level of education and by the subject of the school curricula. The metadata descriptions of resources assure relevant search results for the search over the directory.
- Collections. The collections contain original content as well as references to other sources that created and selected to fit curriculum and prepared for the seamless integration in the home work project by the student or in the lesson plan by the teacher. The resources in collections are provided with annotations and structured for easy navigation.
- Educational web-projects. The portal offers a hosting service with build-in content management system for the users' educational projects.
- Educational news.
- Web forums and online surveys.
- Official documents of the National department of education.
All the resources on the portal have metadata descriptions which are translated to IEEE LOM and replicated over the national portal network.
The portal is not just a search system; it is rather a medium for communication between all members of the educational process which is crucial for handling complicated tasks in educational practice and research. Variety of portal services encourage the users for constructive interaction through surveys, polls and forums (e.g. actively developing forums are "What do parents require from school", "What is admissible in the Russian language and what is not", etc.). Among the most popular services are advisory boards of the country's leading organizations and experts in legislation, correctional pedagogics and special psychology.
Daily attendance of http://www.school.edu.ru about
10000 visitors per day.
Collections Collections of educational resources are a special part of the Portal. All collections are created with the participation of experts and provided with comments and background biographical material, news and guidelines.
Navigation inside a collection includes a system of cross references between the different types of resources, hyperlinks in the texts of articles and biographies, indexes for all sections of the catalog. Objects in collections are structured by the level of education.
Content of the collections is created in accordance with the priorities set by the needs of the secondary school. Every collection contains an extended educational minimum related to different periods of European and national history and culture. Information is grouped in several sections, the collections - the history in documents, historical illustrations, music, world art culture, literature and others. These sections contain facts and the most important achievements in each of the following areas: literature, art, history, music.
List of collections Directory of educational web-resourcesDirectory sections
- Preschool education
- Primary school
- The basic and upper secondary school,
- Additional education and training,
- Education leisure
- Distance learning
- Correctional education and special psychology,
- Pedagogy and Teacher Education,
- Improving skills
- Technical means of training and training equipment,
- Reference and information sources
- State educational portals,
- Internet: the help
- Printed editions
- Publications on CD / DVD-ROM
Advisory boards Advisory boards are very popular among portal users. Ежедневно приходит несколько десятков вопросов. Наиболее актуальная консультация – по праву в образовании (опубликовано более 10000 ресурсов-ответов). Every day a few dozen issues are submitted. The most popular board is on the law in education contains more than 10000 answers.
- Questions and answers on the law is managed by an expert on law in the field of education Helen Bolotov, professor of public-legal disciplines cycle of Faculty of Law of University of Russian Academy of Education
- Board on correctional psychology is managed by senior research scientists of the Institute for Special Education of Russian Academy of Education.
- Multimedia equipment in educational institutions is managed by a specialists of INTMEDIA
- Help on educational hosting and CMS is managed by the portal's editors
Educational hosting and content managing system (CMS) Educational hosting and CMS services (
http://edu.of.ru/) were esteblished 5 years ago, since that time around 2000 directories were created.
The editors designed structure of the template site that allows educators to place any full-text, digital and multimedia resources, such as:
- educational materials,
- personal pages of schools, teachers and students
- school photo albums
- subject collections
- electronic archives
- Virtual School Museums
- Forums
- Journals
CMS provides mechanisms that enable administrators to not only accommodate and structure this information, but also provide convenient navigation through the pages, search engine and services for polls, forums and statistics. Authors can publish documents and archived files, audio-video-photo-materials, flash videos. The design of each site can be customized. Management of structure, content and design is carried out on-line through the web forms. Main users of this service are teachers and educational institutions.