Information about the GEM Gateway including its contents and services.
Gateway Resources
The Gateway to Educational Materials is a Consortium effort to provide educators with quick and easy access to thousands of educational resources found on various federal, state, university, non-profit and commercial Internet sites.
The Gateway contains a variety of educational resource types from activities and lesson plans to online projects to assessment items. Materials that are purposed for use in the classroom are appropriate for inclusion in The Gateway.
To insure quality, organizations and individuals who would like to have records for their resources in The Gateway must join the GEM Consortium. There is an application and review process for Consortium membership. The evaluation is done at the collection level, not at the individual resource level. Each collection is evaluated for authoritativeness, quality, and availability, based on criteria developed and adopted by the GEM Consortium and found in the GEM Consortium Governance document.
Consortium members range from government agencies, both federal and state, educational institutions, non-profit and commercial organizations. Educators who have published lesson plans on the web are also encouraged to join the Consortium and make their resources available through The Gateway.
If you are interested in joining the GEM Consortium, please fill out an application. Membership is free.
As of May 2004, educators can access over 40,000 records from over 600 Consortium member collections by searching or browsing The Gateway.
GEM uses a new, advanced retrieval engine named Seamark from Siderean Software to help you find resources that meet your needs. The engine is built around a search technique called "faceted searching". Faceted searching combines the processes of searching for specific words somewhat as one does in Yahoo!® and Google® with browsing descriptions of resources based on what are called "facets." The result is a powerful new interface that supports exploration as well as discovery of resources.
For more information on how to find resources in The Gateway, please read the "First Time Users" document.
Future services include personalization services for Gateway users, and an AskGEM question and answer service.
