Currents in Literacy

Web Resources

There are thousands of web sites that offer information on various issues concerning education and literacy. We have selected a sampling of sites that address these issues from a variety of viewpoints: parents, teachers, administrators, and elementary school students.

Teachers

http://www.personal.si.umich.edu/~miglesia/diversity/index.html If you are a parent or teacher trying to present multicultural books and those that include physically challenged characters to your students, this is a very good site to find suggestions. There are subcategories for African, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American cultures, as well as one dealing with interracial/multiracial issues.

http://www.soemadison.wisc.edu/ccbc/
The Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC) at University of Wisconsin-Madison provides a collection of current, retrospective, and historical books for children and young adults and seeks to support teaching, learning, and research needs related to children's and young adult literature. Join the electronic forum and discuss books for children and young adults.

http://www.CBCbooks.org
The Children's Book Council (CBC) offers a site with sections for parents, teachers, librarians, authors, artists, and booksellers. Each section includes book lists, links to sites to order publications about reading and children's literature, upcoming events, and informal essays about children's books and publishing. "Not Just for Children Anymore" offers a long list of children's books that adults enjoy reading on their own.

Kids

http://www.arts.ufl.edu/art/rt_room/@rtroom_home.html
Yahooligans is very similar to its parent Yahoo site, with a prominent query box and a list of general categories that you can click on to start looking into more specific topics. Filters block adult sites available on the regular Yahoo. Science and Nature, Arts and Entertainment, Around the World, Computers and Games, Sports and Recreation, and School Bell are the general categories for school age children.

http://www.ipl.org/youth/
Visit the internet public library site and explore the very interesting youth division. Sections include Reference, Our World, Reading Zone, Math Quiz and others. Story Hour is a section with beautifully illustrated and text only versions of several books for children to read on their own or with adult help. Teachers' Corner has some wonderful resources for Math, Science, Reading, Our World, and Computers.

Adult Literacy

http://www.alri.org
This site is run by a joint effort of Roxbury Community College and the University of Massachusetts at Boston. Sponsored and funded by the Massachusetts Department of Education, and the Boston Redevelopment Authority/EDIC/JCS, the Adult Literacy Resource Institute is a program and staff development center for adult literacy/basic education/ESOL programs in the Greater Boston area. It is one of five regional support centers of the Massachusetts System for Adult Basic Education Support (SABES). The site includes pages for publications, special projects around the state for adult learners, and literacy statistics about Boston and Massachusetts.

http://www.wwlp.org/
The goal of the What Works Literacy Partnership (WWLP) is to support adult literacy and ESL programs to define, document, and disseminate their effective program practices to the field. This national initiative focuses on how participation in literacy programs impacts adult learners' skills, effects literacy behaviors, and results in life changes. At this site you can find out about the agencies in the partnership, link to many other literacy sites, and participate in members only sharing.