Supporting Educators to Discover and Select ICT Tools with SEEK-AT-WD

Abstract

Several educational organizations provide Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tool registries to support educators when selecting ICT tools for their classrooms. A common problem is how to populate these registries with descriptions of ICT tools that can be useful for education. This paper proposes to tackle it taking advantage of the information already published in the Web of Data, following a Linked-Data approach. For this purpose, SEEK-AT-WD is proposed as an infrastructure that automatically retrieves ICT tool descriptions from the Web and publishes them back once they are related to an educational vocabulary. A working prototype containing 3556 descriptions of ICT tools is presented. These descriptions can be accessed either from a web interface or through a search client that has also been developed. The potential of the proposal is discussed by means of a feature analysis involving educators, data publishers and registry administrators. Results show that it is much easier to update the data associated to SEEK-AT-WD in comparison to other approaches, while educators obtain from a single registry thousands of tool descriptions collected from the Web.