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The tools R.Byrne reviews would make for excellent activities for ESL students, for studying cultural geography, and for exploring relationship within the world.

Pixabay was recently updated to make it easier than ever to find quality public domain images. Now when you visit the search page on Pixabay you can filter your search according to image type (photo, drawing, vector), image orientation (landscape or portrait), and image category (subject matter). T/H to R.Byrne

Get onto Keith Hughes' channel. He makes history absolutely compelling in short videos for high school students. These videos may help your students get into their social studies subjects and they model a way to bring the past to life. Your students may want to produce some themselves. t/h R.Byrne

"Word clouds can help students analyze documents written by others as well as documents of their own creation. By copying the text of a document into a word cloud generator your students can quickly see the words that appear most frequently in that document. Word clouds can also be used to help students see which words that they have frequently used in their own works. Have your students create word clouds of their work during the revision process of writing a story or essay. The word cloud will quickly show students which words they have used the most. Then ask them to think about synonyms for the words that they have used most often in their writings. " T/H R.Byrne

R.Byrne: "Numbeo claims to be the world's largest database of user-contributed data about the costs of living in cities. Some of the sets of data that you can see find in Numbeo include property values, transportation costs, and healthcare costs." Culture comparisons; includes a short lesson plan suggestion.

Pixabay was recently updated to make it easier than ever to find quality public domain images. Now when you visit the search page on Pixabay you can filter your search according to image type (photo, drawing, vector), image orientation (landscape or portrait), and image category (subject matter). Still, it's a time-consuming process. T/H to R.Byrne

R. Byrne offers an overview of OTUS, a mobile learning environment to distribute assignments, quizzes, polls, readings, etc., to iPads. It can now also be used with browers on laptops and Chromebooks. The Otus YouTube channel has detailed directions for how to use the various elements of the service.

R. Byrne: "One of the problems I run into when trying to find documents, videos, or folders that I have saved in my Google Drive folder is trying to find them again quickly without having to dig through the myriad of my created folders. I also want the ability to quickly share with my students folders that have documents or videos without having to send them a link to each one. With these concerns in mind, I felt that combining one of the best visual web resources (Symbaloo) with one of the best storage resources (Google Drive) was the best way to go. " The article shows how G-Drive and Symbaloo can be used together, with an instructional video. It also offers tips on using the two tools for student research projects. Organization of the tiles in the Symbaloo webmix, and the folders in G-Drive is promoted -- a good lesson for anyone whose desktop and files/folders are cluttery. Symbaloo might also serve as a mind-map for a research project, collecting related sites together, and/or tagged by color. I use Symbaloo as my Firefox desktop -- all the sites I want to find fast are there, not just the ones I have used most recently, which is what Firefox offers when a blank tab/window is opened. Symbaloo also means that when you switch from device to device the same set of tiles is viewable. Run out of room? You can organize tabs with different sets of tiles.