| By Julie Pitlock |
As an instructional designer and content strategist, I was thrilled when the opportunity arose for me to work on Gale’s new product, Gale In Context: For Educators. I knew this was finally the chance for teachers to easily experience Gale’s quality content in their classrooms. We have an embarrassment of riches in our database products—tons of great content—but all that richness can sometimes be challenging to wade through. So why not do the wading for our teachers? Our goal was to find the content most relevant to them and their students and aligned to national and state standards.
With thousands of these standards, there’s no “magic bullet” available that automatically aligns our content. We knew the only reliable way to make sure that the content was truly aligned to these standards was to leverage the skill of our software developers and the content expertise of our subject matter experts to create the solution. As a result, I was one of several people here at Gale who spent hundreds of hours aligning thousands of pieces of content to national and state standards.
The process was tedious and time-consuming. Every day for weeks I had to sort through thousands of pieces of content to find the best one to fit a standard. This process would repeat for every standard I was assigned. However, when I would find that exact piece, it was exhilarating. Not only did I uncover a great piece of content that fit a standard, but I knew I was going to be saving busy teachers some very valuable time. And I’m proud of that!
I love the idea behind Gale In Context: For Educators; we have done most of the heavy lifting for teachers so they can concentrate on what they do best—teaching students.
Check it out for yourself and see how easy it is to use our lesson plans, activities, and aligned content in your classroom!
Learn more at gale.com/foreducators
Meet the Author
Julie Carnagie Pitlock is a content strategist at Gale. She has a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts and a master’s degree in instructional design. When she is not working, she loves reading, crafting, volunteering at the local dog shelter, and spending time with her husband, two children, and two dogs.