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Looking for resources that have been correlated to standards like the Common Core or the NCTE/IRA Standards for the English Language Arts?  Now you can quickly and easily search the Gateway for standards based resources.  To begin you must be logged in.  If you don't have a free Gateway account, simply register and await the confirmation email.

One of my favorite guilty pleasures as a kid was to curl up on the couch with a bowl of popcorn and watch cheesy old movies on TV – the cheesier the better. Anything by Ed Wood was good, as well as the early Godzilla movies. My all-time favorite, though, was Gorgo, a monster who emerged from the sea to wreak havoc on anything in its path. The thought of something utterly unknown and foreign under the sea was an irresistible thought as a kid, and something that continues to fascinate me today.

A few places come to mind when I think about uncharted frontiers: deep space, deep sea, and deep inside the tropical rainforest. (Deep, I know!) In a perfect world, our students would have the opportunity to explore these depths on extended field trips where they would get the opportunity make their own discoveries: authentic learning at its best. Since traveling to any of these environments with a class of 30 kids (or more) is nearly impossible, you will have to get creative to use the topics in your classroom. Fortunately, today’s technology can help you bring your students close to these uncharted frontiers without setting a foot outside the classroom.

If you are reading this, you have probably already noticed the all-new Gateway. I hope you are as excited as I am about all the new features! Like always, it is free to become a member of the site, and now you can choose to sign in through your Facebook account to make sharing and discussing resources with your colleagues even easier than before. (Don’t worry if you aren’t a Facebook junkie, though. Plenty of teachers are still using the Gateway without it!) Please take some time to explore the site to find some perfect activities for the new year. As you look around, please let us know what kinds of resources and discussions you are looking for. We count on your feedback to make sure we cover topics that are important to you.

While most students start learning to read maps in early elementary school, more in-depth instruction on how communities are actually designed and constructed are often overlooked. City planning (or urban planning) is the process of designing human settlements, from the smallest of towns to large-scale metropolitan areas. It involves a wide swath of subject areas, including engineering, architecture, economics, geography, sociology, ecology, design, law, and politics. In a nutshell, the goal of city planning is to confirm the orderly development of communities and surrounding regions.

The Gateway gets a complete new look and several new features!

JES & Co. announced today the launch of a robust build of the Gateway to 21st Century Skills (Gateway). The homepage (www.thegateway.org) has been simplified with easy to use icons. A daily contribution from Today in Literature provides a daily calendar of engaging stories about literary history. A resource recommendation engine will allow user searches to return a more-like-this list of similar resources. The new Gateway will also feature one click access to current and past weekly topics covered by Gateway columnists, Joann and Peggy.

Joann did a wonderful job of explaining the goals of our weekly columns, so I hope you read her post first! I would like to join her in welcoming you to the new Gateway and inviting you to make the Gateway an integral part of your teaching. As you explore, you will find tens of thousands of resources that include lesson plans, activities, units, and examples of best practices. When you choose a resource to use in your classroom, you will be able to see the alignment of that resource to your state standards, and share that resource with your colleagues. It's a simple way to find and share standards-aligned resources.

This week we’re very excited to announce that we’re unveiling a new and improved Gateway. While more information on the new features and capabilities of the site will be featured in the future, Peggy and I decided to welcome new Gateway users this week by discussing our respective columns, and what you can expect to find here. So my column this week deviates from its usual format in that I won’t be offering profiles of resources per se; that format will resume next week.

Welcome to the new Gateway web site and the premiere edition of Gateway News! Each week, this section will keep you informed of the latest Gateway news, information, and updates. Whether you have been depending on the resources and tools on the Gateway for a long time or you are just discovering this valuable site for the first time, this section will help direct you to the new features on the Gateway. We would like to introduce our new users to our weekly columns: Joann’s Picks and Peggy’s Corner, two popular sources of timely resource suggestions and classroom tips to help teachers implement new ideas into the classroom.

The year leading up to a presidential election is full of political advertisements and media coverage of political scandals. Students who are not familiar with specific propaganda techniques may form opinions on political issues and candidates without fully understanding the truth behind the advertisements. An informed citizen is able to think critically about things they see in the media to separate fact from fiction. This skill needs to be taught in the classroom. The saturation of politics and political advertisements in the media will make this coming year an ideal time to study political campaigns and advertising propaganda.