National Adult Literacy Database

Canadians across the country have a new opportunity to recognize the exceptional contributions volunteers make in their communities. Nominations for the Prime Minister’s Volunteer Awards will be accepted until September 9, 2011.

Volunteers in the John Howard Society’s literacy program provide one-on-one tutoring to inmates at the Winnipeg Remand Centre. The program aims not only to improve inmates’ reading, writing and grammar skills but also to help educate them on topics of interest including parenting, victim awareness and substance use.

The Centre for Skills Development & Training, through funding from HRSDC’s Office of Literacy and Essential Skills and in partnership with the Halton Industry Education Council, has developed educational video games targeted at young adults aged 15-30 to help enhance their employability.

The Saskatchewan Aboriginal Literacy Network has honoured and recognized Aboriginal individual and organizational effort in the development, enhancement and/or promotion of Aboriginal literacy in the province.

Frontier College is getting ready for a busy summer of helping children in Aboriginal communities across Canada improve their reading skills. Staff in over 60 camps will work to keep youngsters motivated and improve their literacy skills by preventing reading loss that often occurs over the summer months.

TD Bank Group has announced a multi-year, $3.7-million renewed investment to the program to help Library and Archives Canada, Toronto Public Library and CNIB run the TD Summer Reading Club through to 2014.

An Edmonton consultant’s international initiative will pair countries to build social infrastructure. Literacy Without Borders will also devote time and resources to preserving and building indigenous languages, many of which are on the verge of extinction.

Canada’s relatively low number of people with advanced qualifications, such as PhDs, could be contributing to its failing grade on innovation, according to The Conference Board of Canada’s latest “How Canada Performs” analysis.

The face of the non-profit sector is getting younger as the baby boomer population retires but there’s also a new effort under way to make sure it gets more diverse as the workforce is renewed.

As summer vacation approaches for school-age children, thoughts for some people veer toward year-round schooling. This educational notion is slowly gaining traction all over North America. In Canada, about 100 schools have modified calendars, shrinking the summer holiday to five weeks.

NALD is pleased to announce that the ESL Literacy Network at Bow Valley College has won the 2011 Innovative Technology Award. The network was chosen for providing ESL literacy practitioners with access to innovative online resources that inform classroom instruction and support ongoing professional development.

Building on what has been learned over the past decade about the impacts of violence on learning, here are three groundbreaking online tools that can help students to learn more effectively and help programs to improve their practices.

In Renaissance Italy, imitation was widely regarded as a crucial education tool, challenging students to learn by copying elements of a pre-existing work. Today, such an exercise would be condemned as plagiarism.

James Cummins, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Language Learning and Literacy says: “Education is a part of society that gets a lot of money spent on it, so there needs to be support for all kinds of education research, even if it contradicts conventional thinking.”

With a high school dropout rate in some of Canada's low-income communities higher than 70 per cent, Pathways to Education Canada is encouraging valedictorians to use their graduation speeches to help spread the word that all students deserve the support and opportunities needed to graduate.