The Verizon Tech Savvy Awards are the first national award designed to provide an incentive for grassroots, community-based nonprofit organizations and schools to create programs that demystify technology for parents, enabling them to better guide their children in the use of new media. Click here to watch a the video [1] highlighting this year’s banquet.

The awards honor sustainable family literacy programs that help parents bridge the widening gap between adults' and children’s understanding of technology. Those two generations must learn about technology together, so parents can be effective teachers and advocates to ensure that their children are literate in technology and prepared for the 21st century workforce. The awards are run by the esteemed National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL) with generous funding by the Verizon Foundation.

2008 Award Winners

The 2008 Verizon Tech Savvy Award winners were announced on March 31, 2008, at the National Conference on Family Literacy in Louisville, KY. These standard-setting programs serve as models for integrating technology training into traditional family literacy programming. Click here [2] for profiles of each of the winners. To view the photo gallery of the awards banquet click here. [1]

The banquet also featured a mystery literary caper that played out during the conference, at the awards ceremony and in a 3D virtual world. The caper was ultimately solved by Byron Pitts [1], the Emmy-winning, national correspondent and Investigative journalist for CBS News, and Judy Spitz, chief information officer for Verizon Business. They were assisted by Tech Savvy judge and co-founder Christie Vilsack, former First Lady of Iowa.

Audience members were dazzled as Pitts and Spitz collected clues from audience members who had answered three riddles from literary classic The Old Man and the Sea. To experience part of the mystery and to see the exciting virtual world video, click here [3].