The Gateway gets a complete new look and several new features!
JES & Co. announced today the launch of a robust build of the Gateway to 21st Century Skills (Gateway). The homepage (www.thegateway.org) has been simplified with easy to use icons. A daily contribution from Today in Literature provides a daily calendar of engaging stories about literary history. A resource recommendation engine will allow user searches to return a more-like-this list of similar resources. The new Gateway will also feature one click access to current and past weekly educational topics covered by Gateway columnists, Joann and Peggy.
If desired, login and registration can be done through users’ Facebook accounts, creating a seamless platform to share and discuss resources with others. Registered users can now search the Gateway by standards, including the Common Core State Standards. Resources are correlated to the Common Core State Standards on a regular basis and will be featured for quick access. Registered users can post comments and bookmark their favorite resources. Registered users are also encouraged to rate resources they have used.
The Gateway News, located front and center on the homepage, keeps visitors current on Gateway events, news, and updates. The site features a rotating marquee near the top of the homepage. This marquee will be used to highlight sponsors’ messages and provide one click access to both popular columns, Joann’s Picks and Peggy’s Corner.
“It was time for us to rebuild the Gateway. The Gateway receives between 2-4 million hits per month. The majority of hits result in returning traffic with expanded search criteria. Even with the high number returning users, the Gateway sees over 30,000 new unique users each month,” explained Diny Golder, Executive Director of JES & Co. “Our technical team decided that in addition to the new user features built into the new Gateway, that we needed to physically move the Gateway to Acquia, where Twitter, eBay, and PayPal live, to support the large demand of Gateway resources made by the education community. We have now tightly coupled the Gateway to the Achievement Standards Network providing even a greater number of resources correlated to open source, open access State and Common Core State Standards,” continued Golder.
About the Gateway to 21st Century Skills
The Gateway has been serving teachers continuously since 1996, which makes it one of the oldest publically accessible U.S. repositories of education resources on the Web. The Gateway contains a variety of educational resource types from activities and lesson plans to online projects to assessment items. Visit the Gateway at: www.thegateway.org. The National Education Association is the Premier Sponsor of the Gateway to 21st Century Skills.
About the Achievement Standards Network
The Achievement Standards Network (ASN) is an open specification for the representation of educational expectations. The ASN specification provides for: (1) the text of an educational expectation; (2) rich metadata describing that expectation and its context; and (3) a description of relationships between the expectation being described and other related expectations. The ASN specification provides both a resolution service that returns machine readable text and associated metadata and Web Services that ease the network distribution of the achievement standards data. Visit the ASN at: http://asn.jesandco.org.
About JES & Co.
JES & Co., a publicly funded 501(c)(3) education research/development organization and is a world leader in the development and deployment of education programs based on open standards. With over 20 years of experience in interoperability and portability of educational resources, organizations around the world come to JES & Co. for leadership and guidance. For more information visit: www.JESandCo.org.
