KNOWLEDGE SHARING INFORMATION SYSTEMS IN EDUCATION

Changes like globalization, overall use of IT and the rapid development of science and technology have a substantial influence on all human activities at global level, education as well. These challenges are not only changing the concepts of education, but also evoke modifications in the organizations of educational character. The process of learning is adopting new concepts - instead of learning the content there is a tendency for acquiring critical thinking and skills for further learning; the learning content is being updated - timely valued and updated knowledge is becoming imperative for sustainability of education; new forms of learning are being enabled by introduction of new media - like distance learning; various learning techniques are emerging - different educational software and systems. More complex conditions and great amount of information and knowledge that must be taken into account when planning and managing education require the use of decision support information systems. Networking in education (especially via Internet) is used for the transfer of information and knowledge both on individual and institutional level is becoming very common strategy to respond to these high demands. In these conditions, managing and sharing knowledge in education is a source of competence and better performance. This refers to knowledge of all the stakeholders in education - students, teachers, non-teaching and administrative staff, immediate and distant environment. Based on all these needs and aided by the expansion of digital technologies, a wide range of different systems for managing and sharing knowledge in education have appeared and developed in recent decades. The best known and most popular are: Education Management Information System, Moodle, Twitter, forums and blogs and so-called teacher resources or lesson plans. This paper offers a review of annotated ICT supported systems for managing and sharing knowledge in education. Likewise, paper examines the application domain of these systems: the Education Management Information System (EMIS) for decision support and management of education, the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) for distance learning, Managed Learning Environment (MLE) to facilitate management of educational processes, different social networks and communication systems (forums, blogs, twitter etc.) that help sharing knowledge between teachers and/or students, specialized knowledge databases (popular lesson plans) that helps teachers' knowledge transfer. In addition to this categorization (in relation to the purpose), the paper provides detailed classification model for these systems based on important criteria such as interactivity, accessibility (ability to adapt to the user requirement) and commercial level(1).