National Adult Literacy Database

Frontier College is looking for a contract researcher/writer to conduct research and develop a written summary over the course of the next six months. The subject area is the inter-relationships between justice and literacy as they relate to youth, within a Canadian context.

Ontario is expanding French immersion programs across the province to give more high school students the opportunity to learn a second language.

Alberta’s three-year high school completion rate jumped to 72.6 per cent in 2010 from 71.5 per cent in 2009. The increase follows efforts by school boards, teachers, parents, communities and government to better engage students in the importance of learning.

With a seasonally adjusted unemployment rate of 5.0 per cent (well below the national average of 7.4 per cent), Saskatchewan has now had the lowest unemployment rate in Canada for three straight months.

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.

Canada’s employers are going into the summer a little more willing to bring in new hires than they were three months ago, according to a newly released quarterly hiring outlook.

Increasing optimism about the Canadian labour market among hiring managers and job seekers is not expected to let up anytime soon, with Calgary and other Prairie cities leading the way in job creation and economic growth over the rest of the year, according to several reports.

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.

Tweets and ‘likes’ are becoming more beneficial to business, a new Robert Half Technology survey suggests. More than four in 10 (44 per cent) of chief information officers surveyed said they permit employees to use social media sites like Twitter and Facebook on the job as long as it’s for business purposes.

“Each of these organizations is making an important and positive impact in their communities,” said Scott Mullin, Vice-President, Community Relations, TD Bank Group. “The TD Financial Literacy Grant Fund will help grantees foster innovation and extend their program reach to benefit more people.”

Many entry-level jobs – particularly ones in exploration such as bush work and mineral sampling – attract students from diverse fields of study, said Gavin Dirom, president and CEO of the Association for Mineral Exploration B.C.

A new report from AlphaPlus suggests that with the help of cloud computing, the future of cyberspace for adult literacy will see a proliferation of new and easily accessible literacy tools such as smartphone applications to help read signs and turn text into voice.

In his first public address as Minister of Industry, Christian Paradis reaffirmed the Government of Canada's commitment to a digital economy strategy. Speaking at the 2011 Canadian Telecom Summit in Toronto, he underscored the importance of information and communications technologies to Canada's economic growth and global competitiveness, and acknowledged the private sector’s essential role.

Each month NALD releases Library user statistics in a feature known as the Top 20 downloads/20 Plus téléchargés. The report examines the number of NALD Library documents, in both English and French, which are viewed and downloaded by visitors to the websites NALD, NALD@Work, BDAA and BDAA@uTravail.