So as our blogging for this semester comes to a close, I have decided to pick a different topic next semester for my passion posts. I hope that all those who have been reading my posts felt a little bit more informed about the environment as much as I learned while I was writing them. For my last post about the environment I’d like to give a few websites that might substitute my environmental posts with their own.
1. Tree Hugger
This website is a very good website to find green technology and news about new advancements in green technology. It covers not only technology, but also recent business, scientific advancements, social aspects and other categories for news about the environment.
2. Meet The Greens
Do you know a youth or adolescent that wants to know about the environment? Or do you know a youth or adolescent that you think should know more about the environment? Then you should try meetthegreens.org. Meet The Greens is an organization that is partnered with TED (what a coincidence) and National Geographic and was created to teach a younger audience about the environment. The site is very interactive and teaches about the environment in fun filled ways such as games, videos, and activities. Check it out c: 
3. The Daily Green
A branch of the good housekeeping website, The Daily Green is a column that provides news articles about green related things, posts with tips and facts to live a green life, as well as advice for those who don’t know how to tackle living a more environmentally friendly life.
With these three websites, I wrap up my blog post run about green living. The past however number of weeks we blogged have been a lot of fun, and I can’t wait to think of a new topic to make more blog posts about. These three sites have a lot of really great information about the environment, so if you’d like to keep up with more green living posts and information, I definitely think you should check them out c:
Finally after being nervous and stressed about it for two weeks, I presented my TED(ish) talk. My paradigm shift was the shift from meeting people in real life through friends matching each other up, meeting someone in class or on the road, etc, to the world of online dating, meeting people online and forming friendships and/or relationships.
For my TED talk, however, I focused mostly on the online dating aspect of the shift. I gave some examples of successful instances of online relationships, as well as some failed instances of online relationships. I gave statistics for the growing rate of online dating in the US as well as some other interesting facts.
Some things that I personally liked about my TED talk, was that it was not all facts. As I was writing what I wanted to say, I wanted to make sure that the audience would be interested and not to bore them with a bunch of numbers and facts that probably mean nothing to them. Of course that isn’t to say that those who did do this had boring presentations, but I just thought that my topic was more interesting through stories and examples than through facts and statistics. I thought that my delivery was good for how nervous I was on the inside, but I definitely could have done better. I made sure to make eye contact with students as well as the camera a few times because I knew this was a problem during my Civic Artifact Speech in Unit 1.
A few things that I was not pleased with about my presentation was the amount of times I stumbled on words. Of course I know that I was nervous out of my mind, but I feel that some of those stumbles could have been prevented if I had practiced a little more. I did go to the one button studio two or three times, but I had tweaked many things between sessions so I did not have my full speech the way I performed it on Monday for my practice rounds. Probably something I should keep in mind for the next speaking project.
In my peers’ presentations, I really liked the topics they chose. We had a good diverse number of projects and all of them were interesting topics. Many of my peers who presented on the same day as I did were also very good with their articulation and delivery, and if they were nervous it was hard to see that in their confidence.
All in all, I really liked the TED talk. I liked that it was a very open ended project where you were allowed to present about an interesting topic that did not exactly have to be academic. I would definitely want to do a project of this nature again in the future.
For this week, I will be sharing some interesting environmental facts. Now that the semester is almost over, to be honest, I have sort of exhausted the topics that I can write about in a passion post. So I am more or less going to be ending this environmental series this semester and starting afresh next semester. However, I will do my best to make these last two weeks still count and make some awesome posts about the environment. Here’s a list of facts I have compiled from the site earthecho, huffingtonpost, and theworldcounts.
Cool and/or interesting facts about the environment:.jpg)
1. 27,000 trees are cut down per DAY in order to make toilet paper. (Something to keep in mind the next time we all complain about how thin and hard the dorm TP is)
2. 40% of all bottled water sold is actually just tap water put into bottles
3. During the time it takes you to read this sentence, 50,000 12-oz aluminum cans are made. (Copied word for word from earthecho for effect)
4. American businesses use enough paper to circle the earth 3 times
5. 75 thousand 
trees could be saved if we recycled all the New York TImes daily papers.
6. 97% of the world’s water supply is ocean water, another 2% is frozen in the Arctic…as of now. We only use 1% of the Earth’s water supply.
7. One supermarket uses and average of 60,500,000 paper bags a year.
8. A glass bottle take 4 thousand years to decompose
9. Paper can only be recycled six times, because after the sixth time, the fibers are unable to hold together anymore.
10. Rainforests are cut being cut down at the rate of a hundred acres per minute.
11. Plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kills approximately 1 million sea creatures annually.
12. 35% of landfills are packaging materials.
13. The US is the number 1 producer of trash. Each person is estimated to generate 1,609 pounds of waste. That is 40% of the world’s waste made by 5% of the world’s population.