Resource of the Week: Gateway to Educational Materials
Resource of the Week
by Shirl Kennedy, Deputy Editor Educational Resources--Hub
Source: U.S. Department of Education Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM)
This week's resources is a "gem" in every sense of the word. "A U.S. Department of Education initiative, 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." As of March 8, 2005, the GEM collection included 42,450 resources, each one "carefully indexed using characteristics that educators find useful such as subject, grade level, pedagogy, and "audience" for the resource."
On the home page, you'll find a GEM Spotlight feature, with pointers to relevant materials in the database. For March, it's Women's History, since this is Women's History Month. Previous Spotlight features are available on an archives page.
If you want to browse the collection, there are many different options: resource subject, type, level, keywords, mediator (who should use the resource -- e.g., teacher, librarian, administrator, etc.), beneficiary (specific student population -- e.g., disabled, bilingual, etc.), and priceCode (basically "fee status" -- e.g., "Free", "Partially free", "Not free"). You can find detailed information about browsing the collection.
The search engine here looks deceptively simple -- a small text box and a dropdown menu at the upper right corner of the home page -- but some very sophisticated technology is powering this thing. Called "faceted searching," it "combines the processes of searching for specific words and phrases somewhat as one does in Yahoo! and Google with browsing descriptions of resources based on what are called facets." A "facet" is a metadata element or property. (Note the availability of a detailed glossary of terms used on the site, part of an extensive help section.) The search engine uses the Seamark Navigation Server from Siderean Software.
Each record contains a brief description of the resource; click on the "show full view" box at the lower righthand corner to get additional information, such as subject area, mediator, provider, price code, record creation date, etc. Subject, mediator and price code are live links that you can click to explore other resources with those tags, as is the resource type (e.g., lesson plan, activity, etc.) indentified in the description. You can also explore via the navigation bar that appears on the lefthand side of the results page, which allows you to refine your search by clicking on live links to refine your search by subject, resource type, grade level, keyword, mediator, beneficiary or price code.
To initiate a search, type your query into the text box and click "go". The default option is full-text search of all GEM records. If you prefer to search by "facet" instead, choose title, description or keywords from the dropdown menu, and your search will be restricted to that particular record field." Search help is available, as is a guide for first-time users.
GEM is actually a "consortium effort" comprised of members who make their resource collections available here and members who use and promote the resources. You can apply for membership in the consortium, but you do not have to be a member or register in any way to search and use what's here. When you browse the member directory, click on the member's name for a brief description and a link to its home page and rights/permissions information.
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