[OLPC-Chicago] Come Speak at my School?

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 1:28 PM, Ben Rothman <bensrothman at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey everyone,
>      Each year, the Social Service Club board at New Trier High School in
> Winnetka picks a charity to donate the money raised from its yearly Battle
> of the Bands (AKA "Band-Aid"). I, of course, recommended One Laptop Per
> Child.

The OLPC work is now divided among several organizations. Please
consider Sugar Labs, which develops and ports Sugar software, and
Earth Treasury, which has begun a Digital textbook project, and our
various partners.

http://sugarlabs.org/
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Creating_textbooks

Earth Treasury would like to talk with the Museum of Science and
Industry about XOs in exhibits. We are working with The Tech Museum of
Innovation in San Jose, CA on a classroomfull of XOs for visiting
school classes to try out, with emphasis not only on tech subjects,
but collaborative music and art software.

Please note that newly-installed Gov. Pat Quinn proposes to revive his
Children's Low-Cost Laptop Act, which passed in the Illinois House
unanimously but died in the Senate. We have an opportunity to work
with him and the legislature on this. The original plan was to allow
schools to choose their own laptops, which would have made it quite
difficult to get meaningful comparative data. Earth Treasury proposes
to create a teacher training program, textbooks, and other educational
materials, and to invite schools to participate in testing them using
a sound experimental design. That is, districts would give up some
choice in order to get extra services and materials, and the project
would then assign schools to different versions of one-to-one
computing in cooperation with education researchers. At the end, every
school would be offered whatever turned out to work best.

> Before we vote, there is an opportunity for speakers from the
> charities we are considering to come and speak to the board about the
> charity, what it does, and answer questions. I was wondering if anyone at
> ILXO would like to visit New Trier and present One Laptop Per Child.

Can we do that by video conference? Would they consider waiting until
the PyCon Python Conference in March, when a great many more of us
from various organizations will be in Chicago? Can we interest anybody
from the school in attending? It isn't all about programming, even
though we gather around a programming language.

> It
> would have to be some time in the next two weeks. I can work out the details
> with the Co-Presidents of the board for the scheduling.
>     Sincerely,
> Ben Rothman

Thanks for your work, and them, too.

> _______________________________________________
> OLPC-Chicago mailing list
> OLPC-Chicago at lists.laptop.org
> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-chicago
>
>



-- 
Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name
And Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination.
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Mokurai (Ed Cherlin)