Digital Skills

Connect Chicago Toolkit: USA Learns

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“Establish a smart community benchmark and toolkit for broadband access and use” is initiative four of the City of Chicago Tech Plan. The Connect Chicago program is an essential component of that initiative.

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Stephen Alderson, Director of Adult Education at Instituto del Progreso Latino spoke at the last WeConnectChicago meetup to talk about their CYBER-ESL program, a blended online English as a second language  program for adult ESL learners.  One component of this program is the use of the USALearns website.

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Connect Chicago Toolkit: Typing Club

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“Establish a smart community benchmark and toolkit for broadband access and use” is initiative four of the City of Chicago Tech Plan. the Connect Chicago program is an essential component of that initiative.

Rene Paccha works for the Spanish Coalition for Housing teaching digital skills to residents at their Pilsen and Southeast Chicago locations.

During the last Connect Chicago Meetup group,  Rene described how he teaches beginners how to use the keyboard. We caught up with Rene in southeast Chicago during one of his tutoring sessions to talk about the tools that he uses to teach keyboarding . 

typingclub

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Connect Chicago Toolkit: YouCanBookMe

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“Establish a smart community benchmark and toolkit for broadband access and use” is initiative four of the City of Chicago Tech Plan. the Connect Chicago program is an essential component of that initiative. 

At our last Connect Chicago meetup, Rene Paccha demonstrated some of the tools that he works with teaching digital skills to residents at their Pilsen and Southeast Chicago locations. One of these tools is YouCanBookMe, which Rene uses to let residents schedule training sessions. 

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The Next Data Potluck is at the Chicago Community Trust

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At the first DataPotluck of the year, consultant and writer Q Ethan McCallum will explain how to put Hadoop to work for you, and how to use Elastic MapReduce (EMR), the hosted Hadoop solution provided by Amazon Web Services. McCallum will teach how EMR can help you get Hadoop in a hurry and on the cheap, without the costly cluster commitment.

Data Potluck Panoramic

Panoramic shot of the March Data Potluck meetup

You can RSVP for the event on the Data Potluck Meetup page. 

Data Potluck is a meetup group run by Young-Jin Kim, Matt Gee, and Nicholas Mader that helps to connect the nonprofit and data science worlds. You can find more information about the group by checking out their page on Meetup.

This is the first time that Data Potluck will be held at the offices of the Chicago Community Trust, 225 North Michigan, where Smart Chicago is housed. I’m especially excited to  see what kind of food shows up. Let’s do this.

State of Illinois Eliminate the Digital Divide Grants

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Here is a handy spreadsheet of all Eliminate the Digital Divide grants going back to the inception of the program, showing all grants, grants by year (2007 – 2012), all Chicago grants, and all Chicago grants by year. All of this data is  pulled from http://granttracker.ildceo.net/. You can also knock around with the data in this custom view on the State’s data portal.

Here’s a breakdown:

ALL GRANTS STATEWIDE

Year | # of grants | Avg. amount of grants

2007 | 16 | $756,156 $47,260

2008 | 103 | $5,060,661 $49,133

2009 | 91 | $5,079,129 $55,815

2010 | 101  | $4,944,877 $48,959

2011 | 124 | $5,065,137 $40,848

2012 | 88 | $4,102,117 $46,615

TOTALS” 523 grants for a total of $25,008,077 with an average grant of $48,105.

ALL GRANTS IN CHICAGO

Year | # of grants | Avg. amount of grants

2007 | 11 | $460,505 $41,864

2008 | 60 | $3,327,602 $55,460

2009 | 59 | $3,303,522 $55,992

2010 | 60 | $2,519,574 $41,993

2011 | 66 | $2,728,243 $41,337

2012 | 50 | $2,228,595 $44,572

TOTALS:  306 grants for a total of $14,568,041 with an average grant of $46,870.