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 here. Also, you can follow the bill's progress at here.

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

by Larry Langellier

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

Why the OLPC?

• Links to personal stories so that we can start driving home the OLPC as the best computers for Illinois children.

Data

Children's low cost laptop fund data