Teaching Supplies - The GEM project
A great program that was created to help teachers with teaching supplies for school studies is called the Gateway to Educational Materials project. The main vision of this project states; ‘to be the world’s leading metadata cooperative, helping educators serve students by providing access to educational knowledge through cutting edge innovation and collaboration.’ GEM is a nonprofit organization helping educators all over the world obtain teaching supplies for all grades and subjects. The Gateway to Educational Materials is a Consortium effort to create easy access to thousands of math, history, and any other category of teaching supplies and learning resources found on various federal, state, university, non-profit and commercial Internet sites. Teaching supplies are obtained in forms of Internet-based lesson plans for the teacher, instructional units and other products in all forms and formats used for education.
The Gateway to Educational Materials was first introduced and established in 1997 for the purpose of making improvements in software material for use in metadata projects worldwide, and in obtaining quality resource collections for educators. GEM is continually updating its software to meet current state and national curriculum standards, and to also provide teaching supplies for post -secondary levels. There is no fee to use The Gateway for obtaining teaching supplies for use in the classroom.
In order to insure quality, organizations and individuals which would like to provide or write their own teaching supplies must join the Gateway to Educational Materials Consortium. Membership is structured and divided into levels of participation within six operational groups. More general info and a description of each group, its roles and responsibilities, its rights, and its membership requirements are available on the site.
In order for The Gateway to Educational Materials Consortium to choose which teaching supplies to use on their site, it will be evaluated for quality, availability, and other criteria found on the GEM Consortium Governance document. Membership is free, although you must fill out an application. They highly encourage educators who have published lesson plans on the web to join the GEM Consortium and make their resources available through the Gateway. As of 2004, educators can browse from over 600 Consortium collections for their choice of teaching supplies for the classroom.
The Gateway uses a new, advanced retrieval engine named Seamark from Siderean Software. The search engine is built around a search technique called faceted searching. In order to help locate the resources to meet the needs of the teacher, faceted searching combines the processes of searching for specific words as does other search engines. This will give the browsing descriptions of resources based on the ‘faucets.’ The results become a powerful way to explore for information.