GEM : The Gateway to Educational Materials

The Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM) expands educators' capability to access Internet-based lesson plans, instructional units and other educational materials in all forms and formats. GEM's goal is to improve the organization and accessibility of the substantial collections of materials that are already available on various federal, state, university, non-profit, and commercial Internet sites.

Educators who have published lesson plans on the web are also encouraged to join the Consortium and make their resources available through The Gateway.

As of May 2005, you can access over 49,318 records from over 600 Consortium member collections by searching or browsing The Gateway.

In addition to Gateway access to educational resources on the Web, GEM has developed a set of standards used world-wide for describing those resources. GEM has also developed tools to make creating resource descriptions simple.

The resources described in GEM are maintained in repositories across the Internet. One of GEM's roles is to describe those resources and to make access to them available to educators. Each resource is carefully indexed using characteristics that educator's find useful such as «subject», «grade level», «pedagogy», and «audience» for the resource.

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.

The URL of The Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM) is http://thegateway.org/