THE USE OF SMART ONLINE TEACHER PORTAL (GURU PINTAR ONLINE/GPO) TO EXPLORE TEACHERS’ INFORMATION LITERACY SKILLS

Abstract

People in this era have gotten much information from many sources. Therefore, people need to be selective in
accepting an information. Information literacy is some skills needed by people who live in this era. Information
literacy is a person's ability to articulate his information needs, identify, find, and evaluate the sources of information
found and the ability to use that information. Universitas Terbuka (UT) through its faculty of Education has some
information and provisions to help Indonesian teachers in improving their competencies. One of the efforts is to
develop a smart online teacher portal (Guru Pintar Online/GPO). Smart Online Teacher Portal (GPO) is a scientific
forum dedicated to teachers and others who are concerned with efforts to improve the quality of teacher education
and the quality of learning in schools. This research was carried out to explore Early Childhood Education (ECE)
students’ teachers’ information literacy skills. The respondents were observing, analyzing and writing an report about
some videos from the GPO. The instruments used were open questions which was sent through online to the
respondents. The answers were analyzed qualitatively by the researchers. The online questions were consisting of
questions in exploring how the ECE student teachers can access the videos, how the videos can help the student
teachers analyzed the teachers’ teaching, and how the student teachers have learned from the videos. This research
was held in Bekasi and through online. The respondents were UT’s ECE student teachers. The results of the research
were 1) the respondents can access the video via you tube, 2) the respondents can determined strengths and
weaknesses of the teachers in the videos, 3) the respondents can wrote a written report about how to use GPO to help
PAUD teachers to develop their abilities as PAUD teachers. The research showed that the ECE student teachers have
already got some skills in information literacy.