Libraries for Literacy

Information Assistant is a simple app to help teach information literacy skills. It primarily provides simplified access to findingDulcinea resources. It also includes the content of our Information Literacy Toolkit for homeschoolers and librarians. The toolkit provides a lesson unit for explaining search engines specifically and how to conduct research generally. It should take one to two hours to present, and the material is suitable for both youth and adults.

Seymour, Texas is a relaxed place at 5:00pm as Thursday evening approaches.  People drive through the city like they are already home.  A Seymour Panthers flag marks the entrance to the Baylor County Free Library, and inside two students, Flora and Gloria Jaimes, are studying American English with their tutors, Evelyn Leichliter and the library's director, Lita Slaggle.

Here is a request from Harriet Vardiman Smith, the Director of TCALL (Texas Center for the Advancement of Literacy and Learning).  If you have a literacy program, please look for your program in their database.  By keeping the database up to date, we help maintain a valuable reference aid for helping people find local literacy programs.

The National Center for Education Statistics released some striking numbers about the literacy rates in the United States.  Fourteen percent of the country cannot read or write above a basic level.  Check out the information at http://nces.ed.gov/naal/kf_demographics.asp#2.   It seems libraries should be taking an active role in decreasing this percentage.