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TechLearning annual list of favorite sites of the year.

Teaching unit for eleven-year-olds about monuments around the world.

Happy New Year!

"WordPress has many uses that most of us are exceedingly familiar with. It can be a blog, business website, art portfolio, e-commerce store and so much more. Over the last few years another use case has become more and more popular: WordPress as a Learning Management System (LMS)."

Google Forms is a great tool and I hope to use it more throughout this year. Take a look here for a more detailed introduction and guide to using and creating a Google Form - this was written prior to Google bringing forms into the NEW menu.

"The Anatomy of a $300,000 Kickstarter Campaign (I) A little over a year ago I successfully funded a new publishing platform called Ghost on Kickstarter. If you're interested in the back-story, I've covered that in a 5-part series which starts here. This is the story of my experience running a crowdfunding campaign. The good, the bad, and the sleepless."

"Give https://wordpress.org/plugins/give/ Seamless Donations https://wordpress.org/plugins/seamless-donations/ Smart Donations https://wordpress.org/plugins/smart-donations/ Total Donations http://codecanyon.net/item/total-donations-for-wordpress/9985487 PayPal Donations https://wordpress.org/plugins/paypal-donations/ Not every WordPress site has products to sell. Although many can turn their blogs into a revenue stream by offering goods and services somewhere in the mix, there are various reasons you might not be in a position to do so. For example, you may not be running a commercial business. You could be managing a non-profit organization or have no current goods or services to monetize. Many designers, writers, and voluntary groups find themselves in this situation and need to explore alternative sources of income. Donations are one of the most common ways to do just that, and they can sometimes even be more effective than ads or sponsored posts. If your readers are ready to put their hands in their pockets, you just need to provide the means. In this article, we've gathered together five of the best WordPress donation plugins to help you make that process simple. Why Use a Tip Jar? At first you might have some reservations about placing a donation button on your website. Some might feel it's in poor taste - as if you're begging your readers for help. Others doubt that it'll work, thinking readers will automatically ignore it. But the truth is that a tip jar is a great way to garner support for your WordPress site. It can provide supplemental income if you're a freelance designer or developer, and the amount brought in over the course of a month or year can offset hosting costs for your website. Furthermore, with the growing use of ad blockers, donations can be more effective than traditional online revenue streams. For startups and non-profit groups, donations are a vital means of funding campaigns. Other sites may choose to use tip jar

"Exclusive: Insects could vanish within a century at current rate of decline, says global review The world's insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a "catastrophic collapse of nature's ecosystems", according to the first global scientific review. More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century."

"The Chinese government blocked 17.5 million would-be plane passengers from buying tickets last year as a punishment for offences including the failure to pay fines, it emerged. Some 5.5 million people were also barred from travelling by train under a controversial "social credit" system which the ruling Communist Party claims will improve public behaviour. The penalties are part of efforts by president Xi Jinping's government to use data-processing and other technology to tighten control on society."

"A state-of-the-art supercomputer simulation indicates that a feedback loop between global warming and cloud loss can push Earth's climate past a disastrous tipping point in as little as a century. On a 1987 voyage to the Antarctic, the paleoceanographer James Kennett and his crew dropped anchor in the Weddell Sea, drilled into the seabed, and extracted a vertical cylinder of sediment. In an inch-thick layer of plankton fossils and other detritus buried more than 500 feet deep, they found a disturbing clue about the planet's past that could spell disaster for the future. Lower in the sediment core, fossils abounded from 60 plankton species. But in that thin cross-section from about 56 million years ago, the number of species dropped to 17. And the planktons' oxygen and carbon isotope compositions had dramatically changed. Kennett and his student Lowell Stott deduced from the anomalous isotopes that carbon dioxide had flooded the air, causing the ocean to rapidly acidify and heat up, in a process similar to what we are seeing today."

"To revert the current ecological overshoot and build a sustainable society, we have to collectively engage in changing our economic model. "Sufficiency: moving beyond the gospel of eco-efficiency" suggests introducing hard limitations to unsustainable trends-in particular to overconsumption-and putting emphasis on distributional justice. Seven chapters written by sustainability and economics experts plus a foreword by Janez Potočnik (Co-chair of the International Resource Panel and former European Commissioner for the Environment) shed light on different angles of sufficiency and formulate concrete recommendations to EU policy makers. The booklet ends with a discussion of several eco-social policies that can start the transition towards an "economics of enough". Many new ideas for an economic paradigm shift have been developed and discussed at the academic and grassroots levels in recent years. The aim of this booklet is to build on a rich body of knowledge and bring these ideas to the attention of engaged citizens and policy makers in order to advance the debate on how to implement sufficiency."

"Last year I went to West Kalimantan in Borneo to see for myself the effects of the runaway growth of the palm oil industry. I came home firm in the belief that Iceland would not continue using palm oil until companies delivered on their zero deforestation commitments. This is because palm oil has had devastating consequences for local communities, who are being displaced, and on endangered species like the orangutan (our closest relative in the wild), which are being driven close to extinction. Palm oil has many benefits, chiefly that its yields are better than the alternatives. But it is grown almost exclusively in areas of tropical rainforest, which are the 'crown jewels' of our planet's biodiversity. With 146 football pitches of rainforest being lost every hour in Indonesia alone, the urgency of the crisis cannot be overstated. And global demand is set to double by 2050. At Iceland the 1,000 tonnes of palm oil we used annually pale into insignificance compared to many of our competitors. As such a tiny player we took the decision that the only way we could create meaningful change was to shout very loudly from outside the established palm oil industry. So we decided simply to stop using palm oil until the industry cleaned up its act. It was our own decision to give consumers a choice where previously there was none. We never called for a wider industry ban, and accept entirely that a wholesale boycott of palm oil is not the right long term solution. ..."

"... The prediction is a pretty damn good one. The world is now about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than it was and carbon dioxide levels are at 415 ppm. The estimate was part of Exxon's "high case" scenario, which assumed fossil fuel use would quicken and that the world would be able to tap new reserves in the late 2000s from at the time unreachable shale gas. The memo also warned that the extra carbon dioxide would enhance the greenhouse effect and that an "increase in absorbed energy via this route would warm the earth's surface causing changes in climate affecting atmospheric and ocean temperatures, rainfall patterns, soil moisture, and over centuries potentially melting the polar ice caps." Honestly, it gave me chills re-reading the memo 37 years later. The company clearly described all the horrors we're facing now. The only thing its scientists got wrong was that what they called "potentially serious climate problems" wouldn't emerge until the late 21st century. So much for that. ..."

"In 1973, near the height of the 'population bomb' panic, a computing programme called World1 offered up some predictions for the future. It anticipated a grim picture for humanity based on current trajectories. Tracing categories such as population, pollution and natural-resource usage, World1 calculated that, by 2040, human civilisation would collapse - a century after the best year to have been alive on the planet: 1940. This film was originally broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) News as part of a report on predictions for the coming decades made by cutting-edge computing technology and leading thinkers of the time. The second segment features interviews with members of the Club of Rome, an elite think tank composed of government officials, academics and business leaders focused on the future of humanity. Their view is a bit sunnier, anticipating a world where global governments are forced to cooperate to solve complex problems, people widen their cultural horizons and work fewer hours, and limited consumption - not wealth - becomes a mark of prestige. Viewed today, it makes for an engrossing artifact, raising far more questions than it answers about humanity's ability to effectively predict its future and correct its course."

"Evaporative coolers have been known to purveyors of low-cost, sustainable technologies for years. Without the need for electricity, these cold containers have kept produce fresh from farms to tables, protecting against post-harvest losses in the field and food spoilage in hot pantries worldwide. Now the concept has been applied to air conditioning. Manoj Patel Design Studio in Vadodara, Gujarat (India) has built evaporative air conditioners that can cool a room for days on a single tank of water. The studio designs new products from recycled materials, and they built their air conditioners from ceramics and stone, integrating them with potted plants. By filling rows of ceramic tubes with water, the prototypes maximize their surface area for optimal evaporation while retaining a small footprint. ..."

"A newly unearthed journal from 1966 shows the coal industry, like the oil industry, was long aware of the threat of climate change. "Exxon knew." Thanks to the work of activists and journalists, those two words have rocked the politics of climate change in recent years, as investigations revealed the extent to which giants like Exxon Mobil and Shell were aware of the danger of rising greenhouse gas emissions even as they undermined the work of scientists. But the coal industry knew, too - as early as 1966, a newly unearthed journal shows."

"The Kaua Moho was the last species of it's entire genus and it was the last genus in it's family. This male was not just the last of his kind, he was the last being on his entire branch of the evolutionary tree, there was nothing left on the planet that was even close to being like him. That kind of loneliness is unimaginable. No other avian family has had every single species within it go completely extinct in modern times. Different species of Moho lived on each island of Hawaii and their evolutionary cousins the kioea birds lived alongside them, but starting in 1800 (about the time Europeans started arriving to the islands in significant numbers and also about the time the native human population of Hawaii also got decimated by diseases) one by one they died out due to the introduction of foreign avian diseases and parasites, habitat loss, and hunting for their plumage. 2 hurricanes within 10 years of each other finished them off. They are all gone and that song or any song like it will never be heard again save for in recordings. The hurricanes dealt the final blow, but 95% of it was humanity's fault. This has become common in Hawaii due to having so many species that only exist there. A LOT of those species are gone now because the arrival of Europeans brought disease, invasive species, and people straight up killed them or destroyed their habitats. It is a similar situation on every isolated island or area in the world as humans have expanded and explored every nook and cranny on the planet, no matter how hard it is to get to or how little business we have there we feel the need to interfere in even the most delicate and tiny ecosystem. Even the large, continent sized ecosystems are suffering. It doesn't matter if there are millions or even billions of an animal or plant, we will find some way to kill them all. It is only in the last few decades that serious steps have finally been taken to preserve the few areas on this world that we have not destroyed, but

"My name is Asray and I am a 15 year old who has a keen love of making projects out of cardboard. Today I will show you all how to make a 3D Labyrinth Maze made out of cardboard.This project is simple to make and super fun to play with. Traditionally, mazes are 2D and super boring to play with but I made a maze with a twist so that it is challenging and fun to play with."

En este portal ofrecen, anualmente, desde el 2012 informes con una selección de estrategias educativas punteras de acuerdo con expertos de diferentes entidades británicas e internacionales. Sin duda, son un referente a tener en cuenta. This series of annual reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. The reports are collaboratively authored by researchers in the Institute of Educational Technology at The Open University, UK, together with different external partners every year. The 2020 report, the eighth in the series, has been written as a collaboration between researchers at the Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University, UK, and the National Institute for Digital Learning (NIDL), Dublin City University, Ireland.