GEM is a standard way of describing and finding education resources distributed across numerous Internet sites.

There are hundreds of valuable collections of lesson plans, curriculum units, activities, and other instructional materials on the Internet. The problem has been that no one knows where they all are or where the perfect resource for that unit you need to teach next month is hidden. And the public search engines don't make it easy to ask education-specific questions. Just try to ask Altavista or HotBot for a unit to teach fractions to fourth-graders.

GEM has developed specifications for an education-specific meta-data profile and controlled vocabularies, a set of tools to apply and use the profile, and The Gateway, a master database that currently contains more than 7,000 resources from a hundred sites.

GEM offers The Gateway, a master database that contains more than 7,000 resources from a hundred sites (as of September 1999), many of them linked to national or state academic standards.

GEM allows you to browse lists of subjects (such as Mathematics or Social Studies) or keywords. That's useful for getting familiar with what the collection contains. But the more powerful way to find resources is the search form.

In the example pictured, I didn't know whether or not The Gateway contained any resources for teaching fractals to elementary school students.

By the way, a fractal is "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be subdivided in parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole."

To search, I typed in the word "fractals" and asked to search by keyword. Then I checked the boxes for grades 1 through 6 and pressed the Search button.

http://www.thegateway.org