about the gateway project

Mission

The Gateway expands educators' capability to access Internet-based lesson plans, instructional units and other educational materials in all forms and formats. The Gateway'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.

The Gateway is administered by JES & Co., a nonprofit serving educators and trainers at all levels in the USA and around the world.

Vision

The Gateway will be the world's leading digital library and metadata cooperative, helping educators serve students by providing access to educational knowledge through cutting edge innovation and collaboration.

History

The Gateway (formerly known as GEM) was developed with funds from the U.S. Department of Education to provide teachers with learning resources created by over 750 publicly funded organizations.  Oversight of the development of both the underlying GEM technologies and the Gateway website was provided by the US Department of Education with the guidance from the contributing member population in the way of an advisory board.  In 2005 the Gateway’s U.S. Dept. of Ed. funding ceased and the National Education Association stepped in to preserve this national education asset.   All the while, the technologist responsible for building the gateway as an internet accessible digital library were also contributing internationally the interoperability standards that make digital libraries work with each other.  These GEM standards have been the cornerstone for K-12 libraries built all over the world.  GEM scientists continue to contribute standards to open community of digital libraries, most notably the designation of “learning objective” within the learning resource record.  The Achievement Standards Network, or ASN, was developed to contribute a way for anyone to declare the objective associated with a digital resource.  The ASN is another JES & Co. project.

Membership

Using the the Gateway is free to everyone, without membership.  Each learning resource cataloged and searchable on the Gateway contains a field for members to contribute comments.  Making comments about the uses or usefulness of resources is encouraged and adds great value for other educators when investigating a resource.   For those who would like to contribute to the discussion about learning resources by making comments, we ask you to become a Gateway member.  To fill out an application for Gateway membership, go to the Gateway registration page.