"...The Gateway means helping them in their quest to pinpoint the types of educational materials they seek." GEM Developer’s Workbench The Gateway training materials Altavista The Gateway search screen governance document AskERIC: Teachers Connect: >Glenbrook South High School: "Currently, The Gateway contains nearly 3000 resources, and is updated weekly with new records."

The Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM) An Overview of the GEM Project GEM is a consortium effort with the goal of providing easier access to the distributed collections of lesson plans, activities, and other education resources found on commercial, nonprofit and government Internet sites. Organizations join GEM as collection holders or user groups. Collection holders are trained to "catalog" their collections (create and imbed meta-data), and are responsible for maintaining their collections and publicizing the project. User groups are also responsible for publicity, and provide the GEM team with feedback to help us improve the tools. It is important to note, however, that it is not necessary to join the GEM consortium to use The Gateway to access educational materials. Consortium membership is only for user groups who would like to take part in governing the project and for collection holders who would like to make their collections available through The Gateway. User groups and collection holders benefit from joining the GEM consortium in several ways. For user groups, making members aware of The Gateway means helping them in their quest to pinpoint the types of educational materials they seek. User groups are also able to participate in governance activities to influence the development of GEM. For collection holders who make their educational materials available through The Gateway, this means their target audience is able to find their resources more easily. This is especially true for small organizations with collections of educational resources, such as school districts or individual teachers. There are several technologies in the GEM toolbox which have contributed to its success (Figure 2). The first is GEMCat, the GEM meta-data cataloging software. With GEMCat, catalogers create meta-data records (the individual packets of meta-data which describe and point to objects, something like a catalog card) for Internet resources. The meta-data is imbedded in the resource itself, or saved to a separate file if necessary. GEMCat is available free of charge from the GEM Developer’s Workbench; support and training materials are also available.   Figure 2: GEM Project Tools After the meta-data is imbedded or saved to a separate file, the Harvest program is run to gather and compile each meta-data record at a particular site and add the list to The Gateway. This step in the process is essential; Harvest makes a copy only of the meta-data record, not of the resource (lesson plan, curriculum unit) itself. Harvest collects all of the GEM records together at a central location, forming The Gateway. The third GEM tool is Browse Builder. Browse Builder uses the meta-data records collected by the Harvest program to create simple HTML pages, which are the individual records in The Gateway catalog. Users of The Gateway can search for educational materials to meet their needs using the PL Web searching software, or they can browse The Gateway by keyword or subject. One aspect of GEM that sets it apart from similar projects is the emphasis on training and support. The GEM team includes several training specialists who conduct training sessions with the catalogers of collection holders to help them prepare to catalog efficiently using GEMCat. GEM has also prepared training materials which are available online. Users of The Gateway and collection holders have access to a toll-free support line, as well, which they can use to get help with any aspect of the GEM Project. To demonstrate the efficiency of The Gateway in finding educational materials, let’s return to our seventh-grade social studies teacher, who needs to find lesson plans and instructional ideas for her class. First, she tries searching for lessons using Altavista, using the search string <+"social studies" +lesson +plan +grade +7>. This search returns 26234 records; obviously too many records to sift through. Several of the sites returned by the search are not relevant to the needs of the teacher. If the teacher tries searching for the same materials on The Gateway, the results are quite different. Beginning on The Gateway homepage, she selects "Simple Search". On the search screen, she enters the term "social studies" and specifies grade 7. This search returns only 290 records. The teacher can make her results more specific by adding additional terms to the search. The Gateway reduces the amount of time that teachers must take to find relevant educational resources by enabling more efficient and effective searching. Progress of the GEM Project Fall 1997 marked the completion of year one for GEM. The emphasis in year one was on developing the architecture of the project and the tools necessary to implement it. The effort that was concentrated on creating a firm foundation for GEM paid off — on January 30, 1998, The Gateway was made freely available on the World Wide Web. Year two began with a meeting of GEM Consortium members in Washington, D.C. in February, 1998. The consortium defined collection-building as a goal for the next year of the project. They also adopted a governance document to guide the GEM Project. Adding resources to The Gateway requires contacting possible consortium members, training them to catalog their resources, and adding the new GEM records to The Gateway using the Harvest program. The Gateway began in January of 1998 with 700 resources. Currently, The Gateway contains nearly 3000 resources, and is updated weekly with new records. The Gateway includes the collections of a diverse group of collection holders. Collection holders range from large corporations to individual teachers, and everything in between. Some of these collection holders are: EcEdWeb: A project of the University of Nebraska at Omaha dedicated to providing outstanding resources for economics education. Smithsonian Office of Education: Providing lesson plans and other educational resources in the areas of art, science, social studies, and language arts. AskERIC: A very large collection of teacher-submitted lesson plans, covering a wide range of subject areas. Teachers Connect: A project devoted to helping North Carolina teachers use technology effectively. Includes a collection of lesson plans which are mapped to state education standards. Glenbrook South High School: An excellent collection of lesson plans for teaching principles of physics. Publicizing GEM is another key activity for the project in year two. GEM has been presented on behalf of consortium members to groups in Raleigh, N.C., and Washington, D.C. The Gateway was also publicized at several key conferences this summer, including the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in San Diego, the American Library Association (ALA) in Washington, D.C., and the National Education Association (NEA) Representative Assembly in New Orleans. To page 3 of 4