OLPC Chicago/IL Children's Low Cost Laptop Fund
Overview
The "Children's Low-cost Laptop Act" passed out of the Computer Technology Committee by a 6-0 vote today and the bill will now move to the full Illinois House for debate and hopefully eventually a favorable vote. From there, it would move to the Senate for the same process. You can view the full text of the proposed bill at http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/fulltext.asp?DocName=09500HB5000ham002&SessionID=51&GA=95&DocTypeID=HB&DocNum=5000&print=true. Also, you can follow the bill's progress at http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/billstatus.asp?DocNum=5000&GAID=9&GA=95&DocTypeID=HB&LegID=35963&SessionID=51.
Now would be the time to contact your Illinois State Representative and voice your support of this bill! Tell friends about it - up to $100 million to outfit up to 300 pilot classrooms.
In addition to the bill passing the committee vote, a couple more highlights were that we helped Ryan Croke, Policy Advisor to Lt. Governor Quinn, fix a broken screen on an XO that they have. We had Ryan do the bulk of the work and he had it fixed within 10 minutes. His comment was "WOW"! ;-) This is the first laptop officially fixed by the MVCC XO Center. Hopefully Adam won't mind that we left one of the screens from the broken laptops with them... :-) We also got to meet with Lt. Governor Quinn for 15-20 minutes. He is a HUGE advocate of OLPC and he dreams of every child in Illinois having a laptop.
March 6 - Passes Technology Committee
Springfield, Illinois - March 6, 2008
The Illinois House Computer Technology Committee Passed the Children’s Low Cost Laptop Fund, House Bill 5000
MVCC Faculty in Attendance: Larry Langellier, Steve Mastej, and Nancy Woodard
What We Did in Springfield
- Attended the Illinois House’s Computer Technology Committee hearing on the Children’s Low-cost Laptop Act – where we witnessed the bill passing out of committee by a 6-0 vote
- Worked with Ryan Croke, Policy Advisor to Lt. Governor Quinn, to fix a broken screen on an XO Laptop that they had – Ryan did the work and completed the repair in 10 minutes
- Met with Lt. Governor Quinn in his office for about 20 minutes to discuss our ideas on how Moraine Valley (and other community colleges throughout Illinois) would be able to:
- Train and mentor teachers on how to enhance their teaching strategies if every child in their class had a low-cost laptop
- Advise schools on how to deploy, support, and maintain the necessary server and network infrastructure
- Provide publicity and fundraising resources
