Museum as Classroom

Hello Teaching World! I am Alex, a 6th-year PhD candidate in the History of Art Department and a YTC Fellow. Today I'd like to tell you a little about teaching with art and, for those of you teaching in or around Yale, the wonderful Yale University Art Gallery, which reopens on Wednesday, December 12th.

Contrary to popular belief, museums are not scary places. Nor are they the private domain of experts, aficionados, and elites. No way! They are for the people, especially the free-of-charge YUAG, which has been from its inception a teaching institution. Better still, the museum has just undergone a substantial renovation and re-installation, nearly tripling its previous size. 

Even if you aren't teaching art history, a museum has much to offer many disciplines from Medicine to Japanese, especially the temporally- and geographically-extensive YUAG. The education department would be happy to help you select material and arrange a visit (contact David.Odo@yale.edu for more info). The objects you select could be similar to your discipline's subject (e.g. medical students looking at medical images) or similar to its methodology (e.g. anthropology students analyzing museum visitors' interaction with art objects.)

In this post, I will focus on the pedagogical benefits of close-looking at art objects.  The cornerstone of art historical methodology is visual analysis -- a close-looking of an object to build an interpretation. Formal analysis is analogous to "close-reading" in literature, but through parsing visual details rather than textual. The benefit of having a real, live art object is that you can look really, REALLY, REALLY closely -- sometimes even with a magnifying glass! This ability allows you (and your students) to more thoroughly understand the artist's choices, the life of the artwork, the chemical basis of the materials, and much more.

The first and foremost pedagogical benefit of a museum visit is how it can add variety to your teaching style. For most, getting out of the classroom is an invigorating experience that can inject any class with new breath. Additionally, a visit will activate  learning styles (VARK) sometimes lost in the classroom -- kinesthetic and visual -- through the sheer physicality of being in a museum and, of course, the visual material. Furthermore, you can use the museum  outside of classroom time, assigning short papers or presentations based on student research and/or observation.

Second, developing critical thinking through close-looking can aid in a student's overall intellectual development. It can make students more cognizant of their visual surroundings -- prompting them to question the images that bombard us daily, ranging from iPhone apps to CNN to fast-food ads. In the classroom, visual analysis provides an analogous method of critical thinking, which students may apply to other disciplines and contexts. The process of building an interpertation based on careful observation can also aid in the development of expository writing or even diagnosis.
 

Alongside this post I have a attached some Instagram photos I snapped at the YUAG last week. With these photos as an example, I would like to suggest a museum activity that you can use with your students, in a class or as an assignment:
1) Tell the students to bring a smartphone to photograph object(s) of their choosing.  
2) Have them also select frames and filters for their images. (Most young folk are very familiar with these photo-editing apps like Instgram, Picfx, or even Facebook).  
3) Depending on your class's subject matter, add a theoretical framework through which they should make these choices. This could be gender, spirituality, historical events, chemistry, physics, post-structuralism -- you name it! 
4) Then have the students present their photos and why they chose the object, composition, frame, and lens with regard to the theoretical framework. 
5) Commence fruitful discussion!

Thanks for listening! I hope you all get a chance to see the new YUAG soon! 

Images:
1. Central Stairway, Yale University Art Gallery, Louis Kahn Building, 1953
2. Benedetto Bonfigli, Christ the Redeemer, ca. 1455–1460  
3. Fukami Sueharu, View of Distant Sea II, ca. 1985 
4. Portrait of a Man, c. 300 A.D., and Portrait of a Young Man, 140-160 A.D., Ancient Rome (in far background: Joseph Wright, Portrait of Mr. William Chase, Sr., ca. 1760-6)
5. Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing #786A, 1995
 

Storifying Lectures

Lectures can sometimes be bland, unimaginative, and dare I say, boring. You know what isn't boring? Stories. Why can't lectures be more like stories? I'm Alp, a PhD Candidate in Biomedical Engineering, and I'm writing this week about "storifying" lectures.

Everyone must have experienced that rare moment of humanity when an instructor shares a comical anecdote. (My favorite was a tree falling into my instructor's living room and his deadpan reaction of "well, that's bad.") Injecting short stories into your lectures is never a bad idea, but this post is not about that. This post is about taking elements of stories that make them memorable and applying them to lectures. So what makes a story... well, good?

This is a big question. One proposal that seems convincing is Joseph Campbell's monomyth framework.¹ Campbell posits that many narratives from around the world exhibit a basic outline of a hero's journey from a (known) stable world, to an (unknown) suspenseful realm, and back again. Think of the Lord of the Rings books or the original Star Wars movies as a modern example.

So can we, as lecture designers, use any of this? I say, sure! In our case, the student is the hero/ine who steps from the known world (understanding) to the unknown world (new concepts). The journey (lecture/course) brings her back to the known world through the guidance of a mentor (the instructor) and helpers (teaching assistants). So what are some concrete tips we can draw from this parallelism? Let me propose two:

1. Call to Adventure: Think of a bad movie you saw recently. I'm willing to bet you that the reason you didn't like it is because you didn't relate to and/or understand the problem. Same thing with lectures. Students who can't immediately see why they are studying what they are studying will be less likely to pay attention. What to do? Try to precisely motivate the challenge to be tackled in the lecture at the very beginning. Convince your students that the story you're about to tell them matters. Not just to the world, but that it matters to them. This (image) is what you're going for, right off the bat.
2. Suspense in the Unknown World: Suspense is a great narrative tool. It presents an irresistible incentive to pay attention. The audience feels invested in the problem. Well, guess what? The "unknown world" of lectures if full of problems! So use suspense to draw the students in. Separate the description of your examples from their solutions. Instead of first lecturing on a topic and then following up with examples, state the example first but don't solve it just yet. Get your students to think about it. (How about a short "think-pair-share" exercise or a clicker question?) This creates tension as students realize that they need more knowledge to solve the problem. Now lecture for a bit to develop the necessary knowledge base, and finally solve the example to conclude the suspense. Same material, same time, but so much more exciting!

None of this is pedagogical science; I make no claims about the effectiveness of such approaches. But, the art of storytelling is a product of thousands of years of human curiosity, ingenuity, and dedication. Everyone knows a good story when they hear one... and some even remember them well enough to pass them on. Isn't that one of the goals of lecturing? Seems silly not to tap into such a rich resource for inspiration. See what storytelling tips you can come up with! (Share them in the comments below!)

References
¹Campbell, Joseph. "The Hero with a Thousand Faces." (1949).

Classroom Assessment Techniques

This week’s post is written by Claudia, a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies and Film Studies, and it’s about classroom assessment techniques.

Many of us have learned the hard way that it’s better to test students’ grasp of the material before it’s time to grade their assignments. One category for such tests are called “classroom assessment techniques.” This is the broad term for activities that teachers can do during class time to assess both the quality of the students’ retention and the effectiveness of the teacher’s strategies.

Three CATs to Try

1. Background Knowledge Probe

 Before teaching new material, ask students to make a list of what they already know about the subject area. Collect the lists, and report the results back to the students. At the end of the unit, you can repeat this activity, to show the students how much they’ve learned.

2. Misconception/Preconception Check.

This one is particularly useful if you’re teaching a subject to which students come with prior knowledge that may be incorrect. Consider what common misconceptions students bring to your subject area, and distribute a survey that asks students about these misconceptions. The teacher of a political science class on the Middle East may want to distribute a short survey that tests students’ basic assumptions on the region:

1. Arabic is the language most commonly spoken in the Middle East.
(Isn’t true)		(Might not be true)	(Think is true)	(Certain is true)
2. Islam is the dominant religion in the Middle East.
(Isn’t true)	(Might not be true)		(Think is true)	(Certain is true)
3. Most of the oil consumed around the world comes from the Middle East.
(Isn’t true)		(Might not be true)	(Think is true)	(Certain is true)
4. List the countries generally considered part of the Middle East:

You can conclude this exercise by either correcting the students’ answers or having them research and correct their own answers as a homework assignment. It also may be useful to have a group discussion about where students’ preconceptions have come from.

3. Memory Matrix.

Have students fill in an empty chart, either individually or in groups, to assess their recall of recent material. This helps the instructor know whether students are making the right associations between people, terms and/or ideas. A teacher in a film class may want to give students the following matrix, to work on individually or in groups:

  

	Country of Origin	Major Film(s)	Associated Style
Fritz Lang
John Ford
Vittorio De Sica
Satyajit Ray

The activities above are taken from  Thomas A. Angelo and K. Patricia Cross, Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1993). More CATs and more detailed instructions can be found in this book.

Using Online Videos for Teaching In and Out of Class

I spent a very fun week this past summer at the American Association of Physics Teachers  meeting. As a 6th year graduate student in physics who is very interested in teaching, I found it invigorating to be surrounding by other physics-loving teachers. One of my favorite sessions from the meeting was a "YouTube Sharathon" where physics teachers would share their favorite YouTube videos for use in the class along with associated student activities. I came away with lots of exciting ideas for using videos in and out of class that I thought I would share with you here.

I mostly have physics and math examples, but videos are useful for ALL disciplines so I would love to hear your own thoughts on the use of online videos in your discipline and/or your own favorite educational online videos in the comments below!

(1) Connecting concepts to the real world in class
Teachers often say they want to connect course content to the 'real world' to (a) help with students' understanding or (b) make the content more interesting for their students. Using short online videos in the classroom can certainly help with these goals. The entertainment factor is a given (who wouldn't love spending class time watching something!), but making sure the video is effective in engaging students with the content and/or concepts you want them to learn is more tricky.

Teachers should have clear goals and objectives in mind for what they want students to take away from the video and clearly convey these objectives to their students. To help students achieve these objectives, the teacher should plan an activity around the video. These activities can vary greatly, from having students analyze the James Bond airplane stunt in Goldeneye to determine its scientific plausibility, to leading a discussion on the broader relevance of information transfer after watching the 'levitating slinky' video (see below). This experience will certainly be fun for the students, and also provide a great opportunity to connect abstract or difficult concepts to the real (or virtual) world around them.

(2) Learning content outside of class
A popular new style of teaching found to significantly enhance student learning is the flipped classroom - essentially where content coverage is moved outside of class and class time is spent addressing misconceptions and engaging with the material in more depth. Assigned reading is of course one way of pushing content coverage outside the classroom, but students rarely do this reading without extra incentives. Online videos can be a great way to cover out-of-class content, with the incentive that it will actually be entertaining and educational. And, don't worry, there are a lot of online videos that cover content in a more vibrant manner than traditional lecture.

Here are some of my favorite sites to find videos for learning content, and feel free to share your own!

(a) Vi Hart's YouTube channel for math concepts, but to get you started, here's a video exploring binary trees through doodles:

(b) Minute Physics YouTube channel, which addresses a lot of interesting physics questions.

(c) Check out Ted Ed for great educational videos on a wide variety of topics.

Those are my thoughts on online videos in and out of the classroom, but feel free to share your own in the comments section below!

The Teaching Statement out and about on the Job Market

This is Miti – one of the GTC fellows this semester. I am a 7^th year in the History Department. As the year of my studies at Yale may indicate to you, I am on the job market. This is my second time around on that particular carousel. Teaching figures heavily in my applications this year, as well as last year. All the positions on my color-coded job-spreadsheet involve teaching. As last year, the vast majority ask for a teaching statement. It seems like more applications call for a teaching statement than a sample of my research.

What, then, is a teaching statement, this vital document? Let us do what most students do: turn to the Web! 

Princeton’s Center for Teaching & Learning explains: A teaching statement is a 1-2 page single-spaced essay that explains your teaching strategies and goals and in the terms of your discipline and in the context of the teaching positions you have held and seek to hold. 

Vanderbilt’s Center for Teaching makes is a bit more personal: is a purposeful and reflective essay about the author’s teaching beliefs and practices. It is an individual narrative that includes not only one’s beliefs about the teaching and learning process, but also concrete examples of the ways in which he or she enacts these beliefs in the classroom. At its best, a Teaching Statement gives a clear and unique portrait of the author as a teacher, avoiding generic or empty philosophical statements about teaching.

Great! However, what is it in practice for me, as I prepare for the job market – or the Certificate in College Teaching Preparation here at Yale? Looking back over my double-digit number of drafts (counting only the ones that I thought were final at some point), the one hard and fast thing I can say is, that the teaching statement is the single most difficult text I have ever written. After all, this is the document that will give a hiring committee an idea of me as a teacher – something the positions I have applied for, am applying for, and will apply for put a lot of emphasis on. That is a lot to put into two legible pages: explain my teaching strategies and goals, an individual narrative that avoids generic and empty platitudes, how I am in the classroom.

Yet, the teaching statement is exactly the document that gives the hiring committee the best glimpse of me as a person – as a potential colleague. It is two pages of me in a pile of hundreds of pages of hopeful and competitive applications.

Imagine it, December 2012… 

A professor is sitting in a lit office – it is dark outside. Maybe it is snowing. Final papers will be due and students are e-mailing panic-struck messages and contesting midterm grades. The editors for the professor’s newest book are asking for changes (about image reproductions rights no less!) and a committee the professor is on had a meeting that ran late. Again. The coffee ran out. Again. In addition, she or he has a pile as high as the Eiffel Tower is tall of job applications. The massive pile has been culled once based on completeness of application (not all three letters of application have come in? Discarded.); formal requirements (only one chapter of the dissertation is completed? Discarded.); cover letter (applicant’s research and teaching interests do not jive with the department’s needs? Discarded.) 

The professor reaches for the application on top, and flips to the teaching statement. She or he begins to read.

Is that my teaching statement the poor coffee-deprived faculty member is reading? Is my first sentence captivating enough to keep the professor reading to the end? Will he or she be able to imagine me in a classroom? Will I be likeable in those two pages? In addition, above all, will my teaching statement help me get the job? That is how important this document can be. It may not be, but that is how I have written mine, and considering the emphasis on teaching in so many of the History jobs announced I do not think it is unfounded. In addition, in my one, single job interview last cycle, this was the focal point of the interview. 

We are trained in academic writing. For the last six years, I have worked hard to eliminate my personality, my voice, from my writing. Yet now I am asked to expose my teaching personality, me in the classroom, to a random stranger who really just wants the Eiffel Tower pile of applications to magically disappear. 

How do I write that statement, being read in a far-away office? This is an essay: introduction, body, and conclusion. This is thesis-driven paper: the thesis is that I am a great, dedicated teacher. The teaching statement is there to provide evidence. The best way to expose Miti the teacher (I distill from workshops, reading obsessively online, and from feedback from colleagues and GTC staff) is to use concrete examples: Teaching goal – challenge in the classroom – action teacher/you took – student response. The statement is more than an expose of a teacher; it is also a writing sample. Clarity, structure, and style are important to the document. 

There is no one, tested and true, way to write a teaching statement. However, there are many great resources out there. The Internet is filled with useful resources – you can easily waste a week surfing around looking at different universities’ tips and sample collections

•  The GTC has links to a sampling of Teaching Statements.
• Columbia University: Writing a Winning TeachingStatement.
• UConn, dept. of Mathematics: teaching statement guidelines and role in the job search
• Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching.
•  PrincetonUniversity’s Center for Teaching & Learning.

 Apart from the links above, I have found The Professor Is In an invaluable resource, especially her acidic post on the eightpitfalls of the teaching statement.

  

Chronicle of Higher Education of course has articles on the Teaching Statement:

• Writing Samples and Teaching Statements 
• Everything But the Teaching Statement 
• How to Write a Statement of Teaching Philosophy
• Teaching Statements are Bunk

Writing a teaching statement is very difficult. Do not expect it to be easy. But there is help out there! Do not hesitate to ask professors, friends, colleagues, and random strangers to read your Statement. The GTC is an excellent resource. My statement has seen three dramatically different “master versions”, two of which were made infinitely stronger than the previous ones, thanks to conversations with GTC staff. Am I tooting our own horn, why yes I am! Thank you for noticing.

For all of us writing our teaching statements – keep your eye on the prize: the job that will let you continue to develop as an academic researcher and teacher.

Here’s to hoping that when the caffeine deprived, tired, and over-worked search committee comes to your teaching statement, he will look up, stare off into the distance, and think “Wow! I could learn so much from this applicant as a colleague and a teacher…” and then he or she moves your application into the “Interview” pile.

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

This week’s post is about “A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods” (henceforth APTOVM), a resource that details and categorizes the many ways of presenting information visually.  I’m Damian, a Ph.D. candidate in Music Theory.

Here at the Graduate Teaching Center we believe that one of the foundational skills of successful teaching is understanding how people learn and teaching accordingly.  There are several inventories that conceptualize the ways in which people learn (see Coffield, F., D. Moseley, et al. (2004) for an overview of learning-style inventories); one particular inventory that APTOVM directly speaks to is VARK.  The VARK inventory posits that information can be presented in Visual, Auditory, Read/Write, or Kinesthetic modalities, and that different people have different ways (or combinations of ways) in which they prefer to take in (or give out) information.  As teachers, then, we can strive to find modes of presentation that that best suit both the material and our students’ learning preferences

The Visual preference “includes the depiction of information in maps, spider diagrams, charts, graphs, flow charts, labeled diagrams, and all the symbolic arrows, circles, hierarchies and other devices, which instructors use to represent what could have been presented in words.  It could have been called Graphic as that better explains what it covers” (from www.vark-learn.com; visit to learn more about VARK!).  APTOVM can help us both devise ways to present information visually and concoct activities/assignments that give students the opportunity to interface with information visually.  The table groups methods into data-, information-, concept-, strategy-, metaphor-, and compound-visualization categories; it also labels whether each method depicts structure or processes, details or an overview, and divergent or convergent thinking.

While we might initially associate the visual presentation of information with quantitative fields (graphs, charts, and the like), APTOVM demonstrates how visualization methods can be applied in any class.  Some ways that I’ve used visualization methods in my own teaching have been:

• having students produce their own decision-tree algorithm of how to harmonize a simple melody
• diagramming sonata forms’ thematic-material and harmonic relationships with boxes at the blackboard

I hope you have fun exploring the table, and would love to read in the comments about the ways you use visualization methods in your own teaching!

Transformational Teaching and transforming teachers

This week’s post is about transformational teaching, a broader approach to classroom instruction that was outlined in a recent review article in Educational Psychology Review. I’m Sara, a PhD Candidate in Ancient Judaism.

"Transformational Teaching" is a term created by George M. Slavich, an assistant professor in Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA, and Phil Zimbardo, a professor emeritus in Psychology at Stanford. Yes, that Phil Zimbardo.

In higher education, lecturing is still the most common form of instruction, and makes up the bulk of what goes on in the classroom. But lots of good research has shown that many students don't learn best by listening to a professor declaim information from the front of the room. 

Instead, Slavich and Zimbardo synthesize fifty years of research suggesting that many new trends in teaching - active learning, making students collaborators in the classroom, and giving learning an experiential "outside the classroom" component - are all part of a larger transformational approach to teaching. 

According to the authors, "transformational teaching involves creating dynamic relationships between teachers, students, and a shared body of knowledge to promote student learning and personal growth. From this perspective, instructors are intellectual coaches who create teams of students who collaborate with each other and with their teacher to master bodies of information. Teachers assume the traditional role of facilitating students’ acquisition of key course concepts, but do so while enhancing students’ personal development and attitudes toward learning".

Like regular teaching, transformational teaching focuses on facilitating students’ acquisition and mastery of key course concepts, and like some great teachers, it also works on enhancing students’ strategies and skills for learning and discovery. But transformational teaching might be different from what you're used to because it also promotes positive learning-related attitudes, values, and beliefs in students, such as the belief that students can learn anything and solve problems, or that obstacles are really opportunities to problem solve. It's the combination of these three educational principles that makes some teaching "transformational."

Well, that's all very nice in theory, but how does one teach transformationally? Slavich and Zimbardo identify six core methods: 

(1) establishing a shared vision for a course
This can be as simple as stating the goals for the class on the first day, focusing on backwards designed student-centric goals, or more complicated, by having the students craft a mission statement for the class together. Instructors should remind students that while, they, the teacher, are an integral part of this process, students will be called upon to set a collaborative tone, and to make sure that the goals are realized. 

(2) providing modeling and mastery experiences
Instructors both model the skills that they want students to learn (e.g. how to read an academic article critically, how to use a particular statistical model) and then give the students different opportunities to master the same skills (in small groups, out of class assignments), while inspiring students to see these problems as opportunities. 

(3) intellectually challenging and encouraging students
Instructors begin the class at a universally comprehensible level of difficulty, given the dynamics of your particular school or field,and then pose questions and assign problems that are incrementally harder, to challenge students. This challenging is done while also providing emotional and instrumental support, sensitive to students's differences and learning needs. 

(4) personalizing attention and feedback;
Using discussion section, progress reports, office hours, and Q&A periods to assess individual students' learning, and to encourage students to assess their own learning. This helps students take responsibility for their own learning, and points the teacher toward the pieces that need reinforcement, or toward new areas to explore.

(5) creating experiential lessons that transcend the boundaries of the classroom
Instructors give students assignments to be completed outside of class that draw critical connections between their lives and the subject matter. This can be as simple as asking students to interview several people of different ages about a topic to get a sense of how understandings have changed, to field trips and experiments.

And finally (6) promoting ample opportunities for preflection and reflection.
"Preflecting" on an activity or reading before actually engaging in it allows students to think about their own attitudes and knowledge of a topic, and to consider ways to approach the issue. Reflecting, which is done after the assignment or activity is over, thinks through the assumptions one had about the content or activity, and reflects on the best ways to solve a particular problem or approach an issue. These reflections can be done individually or in groups, but are not meant to get everyone to agree to a particular conclusion or worldview. 

 

So transformational teaching has input into how a course is structured, how classroom time is used, and how students' learning is assessed and pushed further. It also reimagines the teacher as the coach of a collaborative team, instead of as a performer in front of an audience.

Transformational teaching is meant for ages 2-120. But how do you think it would play out specifically in university settings? Do you have experiences succeeding or failing using some of these approaches? Have concerns about how to use it? Inspiration to share?
Talkback in the comments!

Prezi

This week’s post is about Prezi, a free, cloud-based, non-linear presentation tool. I’m Dustin, a graduate student in French, and I’ll be writing about my experience using Prezi.

Prezi’s basic workspace is its 2.5D canvas—a visual map for sharing and exploring texts, images, videos, and other presentation media. The Zooming User Interface (ZUI) allows users to navigate their canvas by panning and zooming. Users can structure their presentations with a pre-set path, but diverge from that path and explore other parts of the canvas when it might be productive. They can also forgo a pre-set path entirely and instead explore the map according to the interests of the audience. Since Prezi is cloud-based, users can access and present their Prezis from any computer with an Internet browser and Adobe Flash. They can also share and simultaneously edit their Prezis with their audience. The best part is that Prezi is free for those of us with .edu email addresses!

Prezi works great for visualizing systems, diagrams, networks, maps, data, narratives, and other complex thoughts. I used Prezi for the first time Monday in French 255/Film 259, an undergraduate seminar on French cinema. My Prezi focused on Italian Neorealism, a postwar cinematic movement influential throughout Europe, and on a prime example of Neorealism, Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Theives) (1948) in particular.

We started by looking at texts, images, and clips from Ladri di biciclette. In the screen shot above, most of the media appears to be very small, but Prezi’s zoom function allowed me to zoom into each image that the class wanted to discuss. As we panned across the map, we analyzed the texts, images, and clips, noted key stylistic characteristics, and suggested interpretations. Depending on the interests of my students, I zoomed into certain bits of media and passed over others. Once we had finished discussing the film, we zoomed out and saw how the film fit into the cinematographic movement (see below). The key Italian Neorealist directors and their films, as well as the basic characteristics of many Neorealist films helped to contextualize Ladri di biciclette. Since Prezi’s canvas is infinite, I can continue to add to it throughout the semester as my class traces the history of French and European cinema. I can also have my students add their own research to it.

Why, you might ask, should I use Prezi instead of PowerPoint? Prezi allows learners to see the big picture. Guiding concepts and relationships are represented visually, as central features of the canvas, whereas in PowerPoint they are just part of another slide. This visual/spatial representation also speaks to visual learners, who tend to learn well with maps and diagrams. Prezi also allows for a student-led classroom. Teachers can upload a bank of resources to their Prezis before class, and take cues from their students about which things they would like to discuss. Teachers can also have students upload resources to the Prezi before class to prepare for discussion. If you don’t get a chance to discuss everything, students can access the Prezi after class. Lastly, Prezi is easy to use and it’s free. Embedding Google images or YouTube videos is very simple. Printing doesn’t work well on Prezi, but teachers can save paper by giving their students a link to their Prezi instead.

But don’t take my word for it. Try it yourself! Your students will be impressed.

http://prezi.com/explore/education/