Ottawa (Canada) –The National Arts Centre (NAC) is thrilled to announce that the NAC’s educational website  ArtsAlive.ca  has received a .CA Impact Award in the eLearning category at the annual Mesh Conference in Toronto.

The ArtsAlive.ca website was competing against 600 entries from across the country. The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) announced the award winners at Mesh, Canada’s leading online conference before 850 participants in Toronto. The conference is exploring how the internet is changing how people live, work and play.

The .CA awards celebrate people and organizations that use their websites to make a positive difference in the lives of their users and their communities. The award included a $5000.00 cash prize and was presented to the ArtsAlive.ca team on Wednesday.

“The National Arts Centre’s new media team has provided leadership in arts education for more than a decade,” said the NAC’s President and CEO Peter Herrndorf. “We are thrilled that the NAC’s New Media Producer, Maurizio Ortolani, and his team have won this prestigious award.”

Celebrating its 10^th anniversary in 2011-2012, ArtsAlive.ca is one of the world’s most popular arts education websites, receiving 4,500 unique visits per school day. Increasingly, teachers are turning to this website for curriculum based resources, 1,150,000 teacher kits have been downloaded from the site by users in Canada and internationally. The kits feature activities and education tools in each of the NAC’s artistic disciplines of music, dance, French theatre and English theatre.

The NAC’s new media team has already won several awards including the Best Performing Arts Website in 2008 from the W3Awards, the 2009 Silver Winner of the Best Cultural Institution Website for NACmusicbox.ca and the 2010 Award of Distinction (Education Website) Communicator Awards.

The website was developed by the NAC but was made possible through generous support from the Department of Canadian Heritage through the Canadian Culture Online Programme and thanks to the financial investment by the Virtual Museum of Canada at the Department of Canadian Heritage. TELUS is a founding sponsor of ArtsAlive.ca.

 

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For more information please contact:

Rosemary  Thompson

Director of Communications

National Arts Centre

(613) 947-7000 ext 260

(613) 762-4118

rthompso@nac-cna.ca