Steven Anderson, instructional technologist for Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools in Winston-Salem, NC,offers 10 good tips for using Twitter in education in this article for T.H.E. Journal.. Some of his suggestions include: Find good hastags to follow–they can expand the impact of a  tweet more than the number of followers an account has Check out the hashtag #edchat and check out Jerry Blumengarten’s collection of educational hashtags at http://cybraryman.com/edhashtags.html Who you follow is more important than the number of followers you have Don’t... Read more

My colleague, Frances Coffey, tweeted this sad story about menstruating women in Nepal.  In western Nepal, people believe these women are impure and bring bad luck.  According to the authors of the video above, Poh Si Teng, Allison Shelley and Allyn Gaestel,  they are exiled and “become vulnerable to rape and other horrors. “The practice, which many believe is rooted in Hinduism, is called chaupadi and calls for “the monthly separation of women deemed impure during menstruation.”   In a... Read more

Lesley Hazleton: On reading the Koran Maz Jobrani: Did you hear the one about the Iranian-American? Maajid Nawaz: A global culture to fight extremism Shereen El Feki: Pop culture in the Arab world Naif Al-Mutawa: Superheroes inspired by Islam Mustafa Akyol: Faith versus tradition in Islam Bobby Ghosh: Why global jihad is losing Kavita Ramdas: Radical women, embracing tradition Shirin Neshat: Art in exile Bahia Shehab: A thousand times no Read more

Awesome talk about Hindu myths and myths in general.  Absolutely worth viewing in class when studying either Hinduism or religious myths at the beginning of the year. Pattanaik’s talk is engaging and  thought provoking.  He is a Hindu physician who has become a writer and speaker about myths and mythology. Read more

Excellent short clip, from AlJazeera, about the origins of the demonstrations in Turkey (just less than 3 minutes) Read more

Sean Junkins, in this Google hangout web cast from Edudemic, reviews four I-Pad apps that are great for content creation. Junkins is a learning specialist in the Myrtle beach, SC school district. He reviews Splice (movie making app), Poplet, (timeline among other things), Haiku Deck (a little like PowerPoint), and Morfu (create famous figures and have them talk). Read more

Here is a short two minute review of the origins of Sufi whirling dervishes. Sufism is the mystical branch of Islam and emphasizes love and peace. It comes from a story in the online magazine, Religion and Ethics Newsweekly. Might be great for students studying Islam. Read more

For the first time ever, 27 Tibetan Buddhist nuns will sit for exams that will give them the equivalent of a PH.D.  Only men could get such a degree before because, according to this story in the Washington Post by reporter and author, Michaela Haas, the Tibetan Buddhist tradition does not fully ordain women, which means they cannot study the whole curriculum. So, as Haas suggests,  this is a big deal and has the support of the Dalai Lama, who... Read more

              Two horrific tragedies–the Boston Marathon bombings and the Woolrich, UK attack and murder–and two very different interpretations. Former English Prime Minister, Tony Blair, believes that the two tragedies represent a problem within Islam. “There is not a problem with Islam,” Blair writes in a article for the Daily Mail,” “...But there is a problem within Islam–from the adherents of an ideology that is a strain within Islam.” John Esposito, a professor of international... Read more

Saw this on the Huffington Post. You can also see a slide show on Muslim fashion. Read more