What's New Archives

September 2000

Easy Voter Redesigned and Relaunched

Easy Voter, the online home of the Easy Reading Voter Guide, is designed to help new voters and busy voters in California learn about registering to vote, choosing a political party, and deciding how to vote, whether at the polling place or at home by absentee ballot.

Easy Voter and the Easy Reading Voter Guide also offers nonpartisan information about candidates, parties, and ballot propositions in language that is tailored for voters who have low literacy skills in English. There is also a section for voters who speak Spanish primarily.

The newly relaunched Easy Voter contains registration, party, and voting information for the upcoming November 2000 election. The Easy Reading Voter Guide for November will be available online in mid September, but users can order print copies of the guide right now. A version on CD is available to newspapers. The print and CD versions are available in English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean.

Coordinated by Susan S. Clark, Easy Voter's content is based on research supported by the California State Library in grants to the Santa Clara County Library Reading Program. Special thanks go to the many adult literacy students from the California Literacy Campaign who helped design this material.

See Easy Voter here!

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I-CANS Goes Online

In 1990, the state of Washington determined a need to expand its basic skills curricula to include workplace basic skills identified by the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD). To meet this need, Washington's newly created Office of Adult Literacy at the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges and the Employment Security Department, supported by a combination of Adult Education Act and Job Training Partnership Act funds, created the Integrated Curriculum for Achieving Necessary Skills (I-CANS) project.

I-CANS was developed as a skills-based instructional system for all providers of basic skills instruction to youth and adults. It assists learners to achieve the skills necessary to function on the job and in society, to achieve their personal goals, and to increase their knowledge and develop their full potential.

Western/Pacific Literacy Network has now taken I-CANS online, making the curriculum available to anyone who wants to use it. I-CANS includes hundreds of useful activities designed to help people learn how they learn best, how to work efficiently, how to function well in a work environment, and much more. Take a look at I-CANS online!

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Western/Pacific Awards Mini-Grant
to KQED to Expand Media Literacy Project
to Include Adult Learners

Adults in recent years have received better tools to help them watch what they're eating. Now, thanks to a partnership between Western/Pacific Literacy Network and KQED, they'll have tools to help them watch what they're watching.

According to KQED, a San Francisco-based public television and radio station, "television has become the primary source for individuals to receive information about people, places and what is called 'news.' " KQED created its Education Network (EdNet) to "inspire learning through the innovative understanding, use and creation of media and to help create a literate, empowered community." EdNet's Media Literacy component was originally designed for K-12 educators to create lesson plans designed to help their students think critically about the information they receive through television.

"Adult learners especially tend to rely more on TV than on other media to obtain information," reports KQED. Now, with the help of a mini-grant from Western/Pacific, KQED will expand its media literacy program to include a component for adult learners. For more information about KQED's EdNet, click here. Stay tuned for further information about this exciting project.

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What Is the World Coming To?
Learning Resources, Actually!

Learning Resources, an innovative collaboration between Western/Pacific Literacy Network and CNN's San Francisco bureau, has proven to be a big hit not only with adult learners in the United States but also with adults learning English all over the world! In fact, the number of countries accessing Learning Resources recently jumped up to 107, and we thought it would be fun to show who's stopping by. So here they are, in descending order of number of visitors:

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