The Gateway

In 2005, JES & Co. took over the administration of the Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM). GEM was formed in the mid-90s and was originally funded solely by the US Department of Education.

With JES & Co.’s leadership, GEM was transformed into The Gateway to 21st Century Skills and boasts a consortium member base of over 700 organizations and universities with close to 50,000 21st century teaching and learning resources.

Now sponsored by the National Education Association (NEA), the Gateway serves NEA’s 3.2 million teachers nationwide and remains free to all of its users. The Gateway to 21st Century Skills provides educators with quick and easy access to thousands of educational resources found on various federal, state, university, non-profit and commercial Internet sites.

The Gateway contains a variety of educational resource types from activities and lesson plans to online projects to assessment items. Materials that are purposed for use in the classroom are appropriate for inclusion in The Gateway.

To insure quality, organizations and individuals who would like to have records for their resources in The Gateway must join the Consortium. There is an application and review process for Consortium membership. The evaluation is done at the collection level, not at the individual resource level. Each collection is evaluated for authoritativeness, quality, and availability, based on criteria developed and adopted by the GEM Consortium and found in the GEM Consortium Governance document.

Consortium members range from government agencies, both federal and state, educational institutions, non-profit and commercial organizations. Educators who have published lesson plans on the web are also encouraged to join the Consortium and make their resources available through The Gateway website.

The Gateway is managed by the GEM Exchange, a partnership between the Information School of the University of Washington, the Information Institute of Syracuse University, and JES & Co., a tax-exempt non-profit education organization. Diny Golder is the director of the GEM Exchange, with administrative functions provided by JES & Co.