Thunder Data Systems describes the importance of this measure of web traffic:
“Your website achieves its crowning success when you see your website has been saved to the Favorites file of a visitor's browser. The "add to favorites" corresponds to the number of visitors who have found your website worthwhile enough to save. Saved pages on a browser are often referred to as bookmarks… The importance cannot be understated. First, it is a vote that the content there has value for your visitor and potential customer. Secondly, valuable content is more likely to be passed to either another potential visitor or posted to another website.”

All we can say is thank you teachers, students, administrators and everyone that visits the Gateway to 21st Century Skills. Your wonderful response and the recognition of the value of what we do at the Gateway makes us proud.

What’s New?
New information about 21st century learning resources is being added every week to the Gateway.

NEA has partnered with the GEM Exchange, Gateway to Educational Materials, and JES & Co to support Gateway to 21st Century Skills, a website that combines state-of the art search technologies and a complete database of state academic standards for core subjects. The Gateway is your link to the resources you need to make learning meaningful and fun for your students.

Here are just a few more recent examples of new items that you can find on the Gateway for you and your students.

Bag of Tricks: Developing Strategies for Inducing Behavioral Change Regarding the Use of Plastic Bags

In this lesson, students first consider effective strategies for changing specific human behaviors, then design ways to influence people to reduce their use and consumption of Plastic Bags.

Communicating with Your Members of Congress

The purpose of this lesson is to acquaint students with their senators and representatives by using a variety of web sites. Students will explore their own positions on issues and then compare them with positions and policy decisions of the senators and representative. Finally, students will take part in the political process by communicating their views with a member of Congress and develop a greater understanding of the workings of a representative democracy.

A Guide (on the Side) to Physics: Debunking Common Misconceptions in Physics

In this lesson, students take a short quiz to identify and discuss their misconceptions about physics. They then work in groups to create children’s books that explain correct science concepts. Finally, they reflect on learning methods and create individual lists of “teaching rules” for science teachers to follow.

Toy Stories: Suggestions for Younger Students

In this lesson, students explore the cultural significance of toys by investigating the origins and historical contexts of popular toys. They also create a "toy museum" by researching their favorite toy and writing an informational placard for their selected toy.

Costs of Living: Determining the Effects of Rising Oil Prices on Family Spending

In this lesson, students consider the effects of rising oil and natural gas prices on family spending and saving habits. They then design a board game intended to help people learn to save, and for homework, create and play the board game and reflect on what they learned.

"If the World Was a Village...Examining Ethnocentrism"

As Americans, we rank very low on the global scale in our knowledge of other cultures and of geography in general. When studying geography, history, anthropology, or many other disciplines, we need to examine our own cultural bias in order to see how objective, truly aware, and respectful of our world we can be. This lesson examines the concept of ethnocentrism and our perceptions of ourselves as Americans in the world.

Watts Up with the Heat: Building and Understanding Basic Electrical Circuits and Their Practical Applications

In this lesson, students create a variety of simple, series and parallel electrical circuits to illustrate how electricity flows through different types of basic circuits and to understand the practical applications of these types of circuits.

Paterson, New Jersey: America's Silk City

Learn about the causes and effects of a famous silk industry strike and how it affected those who were involved. The lesson could be used in American history, social studies, and geography courses in units on labor-management conflict and the rise of unions, or on immigration.

The Forts of Old San Juan: Guardians of the Caribbean

Discover how Spanish fortifications on the island of Puerto Rico helped protect Spain's expanding interests in the New World. This lesson could be used in history, social studies, and geography courses in units on colonization or European settlement and trading patterns in the Western Hemisphere.

Etymology: Solving Mysteries of Word Histories

This eighth grade lesson in Classroom Currents teaches students how to learn about etymology by: using an online dictionary to access etymological information; interpreting and recording this information; forming and verifying conjectures about word origins; and presenting etymological information in a PowerPoint slide show

Technological Twins: Using Technology to Mimic Nature

In this lesson, students list comparisons between technology and nature. Then they create superheroes with special animal adaptations and describe how ordinary persons might replicate the adaptations with technology. Finally, students attempt to patent their technological inventions used to mimic animal adaptations.

Quickly learn to search the huge collection of free learning resource. View our video!

Our brief, seven minute, instructional video is now available on the home page of the Gateway. It’s never been easier to boost your professional skills, add more fun and individualized instruction to your repertoire of competencies. Join our cadre of 21st century educators today.

Make your search for resources from the Gateway or great benefit from your NEA membership easier and faster. Visit: http://www.thegateway.org and download the National Education Association Toolbar from the link in the middle of the page. The toolbar is ready for you! It easy and it’s FREE!

Did You Know?
The Gateway to 21st Century Skills receives thousands of visits a month from dedicated educators all over the world. Tuesday and Wednesday were the busiest days for the Gateway in the month of February. In fact, the Gateway is such a valuable and powerful tool that over 80% of the visitors added the Gateway to their browser Favorites or Bookmarks! In the last month, over 36% of the traffic came from people who have already bookmarked the Gateway to 21st Century Skills. Spread the word and help your fellow educators to realize the tremendous value NEA has provided for its members.

Gateway to 21st Century Skills Statistics for February 2009
Lots and lots of educators are finding and utilizing the Gateway. Every month since we became sponsored by the NEA, we have experienced double digit percentage increases over the previous year’s figures. The Gateway Community keeps getting bigger and we keep breaking records! February 2009 traffic to the Gateway hit approximately 31389 visits. In the month of February 2009, adjusted measures of traffic showed visitors viewed 121,770 pages and created 910,045 hits.

The Gateway to 21st Century Skills receives thousands of visits a month from dedicated educators all over the world. The community is developing into a diverse and interesting group with tremendous talent to share! Come and join us as we pioneer the way to the vision of a 21st century education. Become a member and network with other educators. Use the information from the Gateway learning resources in other Web 2.0 friendly applications, your portfolio, store it on your calendar for easy planning or share it with your student, parents and administrator. The Gateway is here to help you easily meet your needs and make your teaching day easier!

Spread the word, invite a friend and help your fellow educators to participate in this special community that NEA has provided for its members.

If your NEA state affiliate website doesn’t link to the Gateway to 21st Century Skills as a resource on your state website, they are surely missing the 21st Century boat. Tell them you need resources and a link to the Gateway! In terms of a teaching tool, it is one of the greatest benefits that NEA has ever made available to its members.

Are Your Members Using the Gateway?
Iowa and Georgia are the newest additions to our growing list of states and organizations that display their logos on customized versions of the Gateway! Both of these new states and Connecticut Retired Education Association, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Connecticut, Wyoming, Wyoming Student Education Association, Hawaii, Maryland, Colorado, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Washington, North Carolina, New York, New Jersey, Vermont, South Dakota and Tennessee and have all created versions of the Gateway that displays the state affiliate logos.

And now, not only will your affiliate members be greeted with a view of your logo but anyone who declares that they hail from your branded state will also see that affiliate’s logo. This will underscore your local commitment to provide the members of the profession with the tools and resources they need to succeed in driving improvements to student achievement.

We want to hear from you. What would you like to see added to the Gateway? What improvements would you like to see? Send your suggestions, thoughts and observations on how we can make the Gateway to 21st Century Skills a more valuable tool for you, your students and your fellow teachers. Contact Bruce Walker at brucew@jesandco.org.

Who’s Joining the Gateway?

From students and pre-service teachers to experienced educators in all parts of educational enterprise, everyone finds value in the Gateway collection of learning resources. What a tremendously diverse and interesting group of people find their way to the Gateway! The community is growing in size and harnessing the awesome power that comes from a huge set of life skills. To show you what we at the Gateway have noticed we did some research on the diversity of members in the biographies written by new members applying for Gateway membership.

Here are some excerpts from the biographies of recent Gateway applications for membership. Members show their support for the Gateway by joining and it is Free! Membership allows you to make notes and comment about the resources you find on the Gateway. You can share those observations with your peers or make comments that are only for your use. It’s like your own personal Gateway to over 50,000 quality learning resources.

T.E.-Maine
I am a special Ed teacher at Edward Little High School, in Auburn, Maine

A.F. -VA.
I teach English 12 at a high school in Virginia Beach, VA.
Title:

S.B.-CA
I am an Education coordinator at the Santa Barbara Zoo

J.B.-MI
I am a second grade teacher and I love my job!

E.O.-CA
I am a Transition Liaison at Paramount Unified School District. I work with 6-8 grades SDC students on career awareness.

R.C-NC
Middle Grades Language Arts Educator-focus on Right Brain activities in order to increase critical thinking skills for young adolescent learners.

S.-MI
I am a second grade teacher in a rural community. My passion is reading and researching evidenced-base strategies to improve my students' reading and writing achievement. Through reading and writing, I want my students to discover, first-hand, the power of thinking and learning through literacy.
the past 18 years. I’m teaching all subjects at a hospital school and a rehab centre.

G.C.-PA
27 years of classroom experience as a Computer Science teacher. I also taught AP Computer Science. My current position is working on a state technology integration grant as a classroom for the future coach.

C.R.-SC
I am currently a senior intern at the University of South Carolina. I am an elementary education major.

T.O.-WA
Music Specialist, currently teaching K-5 in WA State. I enjoy all genres of music!
NEA Membership:

L.B.-MO
I am a computer lab teacher for grades 3-5 integrating technology into the curriculum.

J.N.-VA
I am an Assistant Principal with Roanoke City Public Schools.

S.W.-MO
I teach High School Special Education, in a rural school in Missouri. I teach Social Studies.

A.S.-TX
a 7th grade science teacher eager to learn all I can to improve the education that I can give to my students

R.R.-VA
Transition teacher with Loudoun County Public Schools working with high school students to provide a successful transition from high school to post secondary life.

R.A.B.-NC
I am a Special Education teacher in high school. I have a master’s degree and have earned National Board Certification. I currently teach special needs students in the Occupational Course of Study. The OCS prepares special needs students for employment upon high school graduation. I currently teach the math, science and social studies courses which are a part of this curriculum.

K.L.-TX
Teacher of Family and Consumer Sciences in Hamilton, Texas; integration of technology a must in the class; looking for webquest for grades 9-12 associated with curriculum

C.K.-CO
I am an 8th grade physical science teacher, and also teach 7th grade health as well. This is my 30th year of teaching. Currently I am involved with a large project for my school district creating online course about Renewable Energy.