In case you didn’t know, the new Star Wars movie is a pretty big deal. People all over the world lined up to see the movie, and as one would expect, it smashed all of the box office records. Anyone thinking a movie in December couldn’t get the records was very wrong.
But just how much did “The Force Awakens” actually make? Check out the infographic below for a look. It’s staggering just how much money it brought in!
Via CanyonInternet
Plan a more relaxing trip than last time. Instead of scheduling your vacation to visit the sites everyone else has seen, head somewhere different and see things you didn’t expect. You just need to know where to find the right information.
This is a time of year when a lot of people travel to see friends and family, and it can be really stressful. You can make it better: my colleague Matt, for example, recently outlined secret flying tips that make traveling better. But if you’re like me, by the end of Christmas you’re ready to plan a different sort of trip entirely: one a lot more relaxing than the holidays.
Today Cool Websites and Apps shows you five sites for exploring the world in entirely new ways – hopefully ways you’ll find more interesting. Let’s get started.
Lots of people view traveling as a checklist. Going to Paris? View the Mona Lisa and the Eiffel Tower. New York? Check out the Statue of Liberty and Times Square. If these iconic travel stops don’t interest you, check out Atlas Obscura and find out about something a little different. This travel site is focused less on the big tourist draws and more on the weird sort of things locals might know about.
I actually used it to discover an amazing thing in my newly adopted city of Portland, Oregon: a massive flock of migrating birds that sleep in the same chimney for a month every year. I bet you can find something amazing near where you live, or any place you’re about to visit.
We’ve pointed this site out years ago while talking about free travel guide websites, but it’s come a long way since then – and has a totally different look. Give it a show.
If you’re heading out of town, you’re going to want to find the best deal possible. We’ve talked about plenty of ways to find cheap flights, but somehow we’ve never mentioned Fareness until now. Unlike other sites, which focus on finding you tickets for an exact date to an exact place, Fareness does everything it can to make you aware of when prices will be cheapest.
This is a great way to find somewhere to visit on a whim – perfect if you want to get away and don’t quite care precisely where you end up. That’s what exploration is all about, after all.
If you’re not already excited about hitting the open road and finding amazing new places, maybe Travelisty can change your mind. This site is basically Reddit, but for travel stories. You’ll find all kinds of great tales from people who are exploring the planet.
Do some reading, get excited.
Maybe you don’t have time for a vacation right now, but still want to see something new. Travel By Drone is a great site that shows you aerial footage from around the world, collected by enthusiastic drone owners. Just browse the map and you’ll find videos from all sorts of places, like this one I found in Malaysia:
If this sort of drone photography doesn’t get you excited to explore more of the world, I’m not sure what will. Explore places you’ve always wanted to see to check them out from a unique perspective.
Didn’t find what you need in this list? Then let’s end this roundup of travel tools with a roundup of travel tools. Traveler Stash is a constantly updated directory of useful sites and services intended to always point you at the best tools for things like finding a flight, hotel, or car rental.
Who say they are — “a group of travel hackers & entrepreneurs who have realized that the problem behind trip planning is no longer a lack of tools, but a problem of finding the right ones.” Check the site out and decide whether you agree with their choices.
So, there are few sites we think could make planning your next trip a lot easier – and better. What other travel tips do you have? I’d like to discuss them in the comments below.
I’ll get things started: I like using CouchSurfing to find people to stay with, because I always meet people from the place I’m visiting and learn a lot. I also like finding the right tools for road trips. Let’s hear what you have to say.
Back in September, Facebook made a deal with Summit Public Schools. Don’t worry if you didn’t hear about it when it happened – it was a quiet event, without a lot of fanfare. With that being said, the implications of this partnership might change everything we know about public education.
Summit Public schools are public high schools founded in 2003 by parents and community members who wanted to re-imagine high school education in the United States.
Over the last decade enrollment has grown close to 2000 students at eleven different high schools, and Summit schools have spread from their California home to Washington state.
Summit Public Schools believe strongly in students participating in self-directed learning. This has resulted in an education system that looks entirely different from the typical American high school experience.
The driving focus at Summit schools is to prepare every single student for college and university, no matter their background, and to ensure that their graduates will be “thoughtful and considerate members of society”.
This seems like a crazy goal, but Summit is trying some equally crazy strategies to make it happen.
There is no streaming students into separate tracks dependent on their academic achievement levels. Every student at Summit receives a personalized education plan, focusing on their past experiences, current interests, and future plans.
Learning is accomplished at an individual pace through online course content (presented in a variety of mediums including video, text, and audio), discussions with peers, and one-on-one tutoring from teachers and community mentors.
Instead of teachers acting as aloof educators, they are seen as mentors and collaborators – breaking down social barriers to facilitate learning through supportive relationships.
The other great thing that Summit is doing is placing a focus on technology and innovation. This focus may seem as natural as breathing in tech-focused Silicon Valley where the schools are based, but it’s a school model that is going to become increasingly important as our world’s use of technology continues to grow.
An interactive tool on Summit’s website may give you a better idea of what a day in the life of a Summit student is like – it’s so cool that it may leave you wanting to go back to high school! (Trust me, I never thought I’d say that either!)
It’s nice that there’s this crazy school happening in California, but why on earth would Facebook be interested in it?
It all started when Priscilla Chan, wife of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, toured the school and told her husband that he had to see it for himself.
Zuckerberg is known for philanthropy, and Summit is definitely a worthy cause. American public schools are generally only seen as average (or below-average) on a global scale, and education issues only become more pronounced in under-funded schools. Education in the United States is something that has needed reform for a long time, and Summit is demonstrating success with an approach that just might be the solution educators and policy makers have been looking for.
True to form, Zuckerberg offered Diane Tavenner (Summit’s founder) a donation for the schools. However, she replied that what Summit really needed was code to run and develop the software used for students’ personalized learning plans.
Facebook got on board.
The partnership between Summit and Facebook is small, but exciting. Zuckerberg shared the partnership on his personal Facebook with some elaboration:
The platform we’re building with Summit — called the Personalized Learning Platform, or PLP — is completely separate from the Facebook service . . . Building software that will enable personalized learning for all children is a new and exciting challenge for Facebook and we can’t do it alone. We’re committed to listening to and learning from the education community — teachers, parents and organizations that are supporting personalized learning — and we’re looking forward to opening up to more students soon.
While the partnership is still in its very early stages, Facebook hopes that in the future it will be able to offer PLP software to students across the country, for free.
Facebook has already changed the way that our world works with regards to communication and social media use, so its potential impact on education should not be underestimated.
Summit boasts incredible success statistics; 96% of its students are accepted to a 4-year college or university program upon graduation – much higher than Silicon Valley’s average college preparedness rate (currently less than 50%). Even students who choose not to attend post-secondary education benefit from the skills they learn about self-directed learning and technology, and are better prepared as global citizens and members of the workforce.
It’s easy to see Summit’s success stories as a phenomenon unique to Silicon Valley, and as an unsustainable model for widespread use.
However, that really isn’t the case.
To be quite frank, the education system currently in place is broken, and it needs to be fixed. Many of the resources being used in Summit’s education plans are free online resources available to anyone at any time, such as Khan Academy math videos and the Crash Course videos produced by Hank and John Green.
There is no reason that resources such as these couldn’t be implemented more widely, especially if Facebook is providing free, quality software that can make personalized learning plans for individual students a reality rather than a dream and free up time for teachers to be mentors and facilitators.
Everyone is already aware that education needs to become more tech-based as the use of technology has expanded into every sphere of our lives. Google has already introduced Google Classroom, and there are also an incredible number of apps for students, educational video games, and integration of technology into the classroom.
That being said, do you think Facebook and Summit are taking this kind of learning too far? Or, like me, are you ready to sign up and re-do high school in this innovative, creative, and personalized way?
Image Credit: technologies at school by Goodluz via Shutterstock
Though the Web became publicly available in 1990, the first web search engine didn’t arrive until 1993. Up until then, all websites were manually tracked and indexed by people.
And while we now recognize Google as the king of web search, Google wasn’t even in the game until 1998. During that five-year gap, twenty other search engines had their chance at glory, and most of them failed. You might even remember some of them.
WebCrawler (1994). Of all still-surviving search engines, WebCrawler is the oldest. Today, it aggregates results from Google and Yahoo.
Lycos (1994). Born out of Carnegie Mellon University and still alive today. Also owns several other nostalgic Internet brands, including Angelfire, Tripod, and Gamesville.
AltaVista (1995). This was one of the most popular search engines in the 1990s, but was acquired by Yahoo in 2003 and subsequently shut down in 2013.
Excite (1995). One of the most recognizable brands back in the 1990s, but has since fallen out of the spotlight.
Yahoo (1995). Definitely one of the strongest pre-Google brands to still exihttp://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-advanced-search-engines-web/st today. In fact, according to Alexa, Yahoo was the 4th most globally-visited website in June 2015. Impressive!
Dogpile (1996). It has a terrible brand name, but maybe that’s what made it memorable. Today, Dogpile aggregates results from Google, Yahoo, and the Russian search engine, Yandex (which is also older than Google!).
Ask Jeeves (1996). This engine was unique due to its question-and-answer format, plus it had a memorable mascot in Jeeves the Butler. Sadly, Jeeves was eventually phased out and the site rebranded to Ask.com. (Not to be confused with AskBoth.)
How many of these do you remember? Which one was your favorite? Do you still use any of these? Tell us in the comments below!
Image Credit: Search Query by isak55 via Shutterstock