7 ms·

Show HN: I'm a teacher and built an AI presentation tool

260 points by slidehero 2y ago

Hi, I'm a high school teacher from Australia and I've built what I'd like to think is a pretty nifty ChatGPT powered presentation tool for teachers. I'd love it if you could have a look at it and give me some of your feedback. I don't think there's much overlap with the HN crowd and school teachers, but I've been coming here for many years and thought I'd post here and see what you all think. Check it out if you have a minute and I'd be super happy to hear your feedback too. https://www.slidehero.ai/ https://www.slidehero.ai/ You can jump in and have a play with the tool all you like ;) Cheers, Eli

ako 2y ago
Tried it with Firefox on an iPad. Could not get past the pop up dialog when opening the page, the ok button is below the fold, and I can’t scroll the page up.
- slidehero 2y ago
  Thanks for the heads up. Tbh, the editor is not completely usable on Mobile, there are some interactions that I still need to polish up to make more mobile friendly.
OccamsMirror 2y ago
Pretty cool! Would it work for primary school teachers?
- slidehero 2y ago
  Thank you, yes there is an option to choose student age from kindy through to adult. GPT does a great job of choosing language suitable for the target student age. It's actually kind of fun to generate presentations for e.g. Quantum mechanics and target a year 1 aged audience hehe :) produces some surprisingly insightful content.
TKAU 2y ago
Very cool! There is a python library called manim that's used to create math animations, maybe could get ChatGPT to write code and integrate some animation videos into the presentations to help visualize some math ideas.
- slidehero 2y ago
  thank you for the tip, this looks like an awesome library! :)
- rahimnathwani 2y ago
  It's tricky to get ChatGPT (even with o1 pro) to generate good manim code: https://x.com/RahimNathwani/status/1901771994397622357?t=LGOYULUomQNPhTC6dqmRng&s=19 https://x.com/RahimNathwani/status/1901771994397622357?t=LGO...
  - champdebloom 2y ago
    Have you tried with Claude? I recall seeing a tweet with impressive results.
    - rahimnathwani 2y ago
      I tried this prompt on o1 pro, sonnet 3.7 extended, and o3-mini-high: "Create code for a manim video that shows how to do the long division algorithm." None of them gave satisfactory results. (They all provided code that 'worked' in the sense that it created a valid video file.)
  - Secretmapper 2y ago
    There was a paper recently that tackled this: https://tiger-ai-lab.github.io/TheoremExplainAgent/ https://tiger-ai-lab.github.io/TheoremExplainAgent/
gus_massa 2y ago
It has more features than what I expected. Can you share some details bout the tech stack and how you wrote it? I autogenerated some slides. Who is paying the tokens? They are nice, but I have two suggestions: In my opinion, they have too much text. I prefer shorter text in slides. I alfo got white text on a black rectangle over a light blue background. I'd prefer a version without the black rectangle.
- slidehero 2y ago
  >It has more features than what I expected. appreciate it >Can you share some details bout the tech stack and how you wrote it? I'm old school, it's php on the back and vanilla JS on the front with JQ for basic dom manipulation, Node and socket.io for the chatgpt back and forth. >Who is paying the tokens? Me for now :) >In my opinion, they have too much text. I prefer shorter text in slides. fair point. I generate a little extra so that the teacher can remove the content that is not relevant. I'm a classroom teacher, so I personally use the slides as a way to cover basics and then to give to students who are absent to catch up (happens a lot). >I alfo got white text on a black rectangle over a light blue background. There is a "Themes" buttons which offers about a dozen premade themes and then customization for all aspects of the slides (paragraph, true/false, images etc). It's pretty quick to find a style that appeals to you. Thanks for your feedback.
  - gus_massa 2y ago
    I was thinking about slides for conferences. (I tested with the word "banana" anyway.) In conferences, walls of text is a very common design error. I teach math in the first year of the university. When I started, One very useful recomendation was: > Whater you write in the blackboard, they will copy in their paper notebook and may read and learn some day later. > Whaterver you only say, goes away with the wind. So I try to write down in the blackboard everithing I say. So slides for a classroom shoud have more text than what I usually expect.
    - slidehero 2y ago
      I appreciate that. It's hard to find the perfect balance.
GlacierFox 2y ago
Hey, pretty cool! Good going for building all that out yourself, have you worked in Web-tech or anything before?
- slidehero 2y ago
  Thanks. Yes I worked in web dev 22 years ago after graduating with a CS degree. I've been a high school teacher for over 20 years now though. I've always had side projects on the boil though as I love web dev and try to keep up with changes in the field.
  - replwoacause 2y ago
    Impressive! Congrats on launching.
    - slidehero 2y ago
      Thank you!
topbenteacher 2y ago
This looks great, Eli. I'm an Australian software developer in the midst of changing careers into primary school teaching at the moment. I still check Hacker News every day out of habit. Perhaps the overlap is stronger than you think! I've recently worked on my own AI-assisted learning site to scratch my own itch for learning the Ukrainian language: https://naholosy.com https://naholosy.com . Nothing in the primary learning space yet... However, I'm also in the final year of a masters and will be producing a self-study on how to leverage my software background to improve teaching outcomes for Australian teachers. I've been thinking about the various ways that I might use my knowledge of students' progression and misconceptions in order to generate tailored exercises to help them whilst saving the labour of manually fitting to a template. Your work looks VERY highly aligned with the sorts of things I might want to do. I would love to reach out to you in the future and discuss your approaches and/or possible ways to collaborate. I'll drop you an email when I can. My own is topbenteacher AT protonmail.com
- deleted 2y ago
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- slidehero 2y ago
  Thanks! >I'm an Australian software developer in the midst of changing careers into primary school teaching at the moment. I still check Hacker News every day out of habit. Perhaps the overlap is stronger than you think! That's fantastic I hope the study is going well and you're enjoying the change. The classroom is so different to office work - hectic, but very rewarding too. I've done a decent amount of primary teaching too and enjoyed it a lot. > a self-study on how to leverage my software background to improve teaching outcomes for Australian teachers. Excellent! There are so many ways in which teachers can be supported with software, I think you'll find this rewarding to explore. >I would love to reach out to you in the future and discuss your approaches and/or possible ways to collaborate. Of course! I'd love to chat. You can reach me at eli AT slidehero DOT ai
sergiotapia 2y ago
potential to be the bingocardcreator.com for teachers, if you market this right. nice job!
- slidehero 2y ago
  haha I can only hope! I've taken Patrick's bingo card advice and now working hard to generate content to hopefully catch some of that long tail traffic :) >if you market this right I'm muddling around as best I can with marketing, hopefully I can work it out.
harshnigam 2y ago
That's awesome. While being focused is good, do you see yourself expanding to more levels of academia? It was just today I was looking into solutions such as reveal.js, curious what worked for you the best?
- slidehero 2y ago
  >While being focused is good, do you see yourself expanding to more levels of academia? Possibly. At this point I'm a one man band, so I'm sticking to what I know best. I'm finding a strong positive reaction from teachers, so I'm quietly hoping that I've hit on something that resonates. I think the app can be repurposed for either academia as you mention or possibly other fields, but I'm just taking it one step ata time for now. >It was just today I was looking into solutions such as reveal.js, curious what worked for you the best? I'm aware of reveal, but I decided to roll my own solution which has so far worked out well.
julienmarie 2y ago
That's amazing. That could also be used for training employees. Just made a test for our use case and the results are pretty good! I have an ecommerce company selling fine food and one major issue is training our employees with deep fine food knowledge. Coupled with a RAG / Internal documentation, it could generate training material s for also internal procedures, etc... One thing I noticed, is there is a lot of repetition of the same concepts in the slides generated. It would be great to be able to tweak the outline before it generates the slides. But all in all, really great stuff! Congratulations!
- slidehero 2y ago
  Thank you. >That could also be used for training employees. Yes! You're absolutely right. I have ideas about how the existing framwork can be repurposed and what you suggest is exactly right. >Coupled with a RAG / Internal documentation, it could generate training material s for also internal procedures, etc... Yeah spot on. >One thing I noticed, is there is a lot of repetition of the same concepts in the slides generated. Thanks for the feedback. I'll continue to tweak the prompts.
cube00 2y ago
It's heart breaking to think a whole generation will soon be brought up on learning from AI generated slop. Here's my attempt at using this tool: Learning Intention: To understand the differences between MP3 and WAV audio formats and the concept of audio compression. What does AI give us? Rambling text that adds nothing to progress a student's learning intention: Each format has its own strengths and weaknesses, which may affect your listening experience. [..] Choosing between them depends on your needs, whether you value quality or convenience. On a later slide in the same presentation the more rambling appears: Audio compression is vital for efficient sound management. Knowing different types of audio can enhance your media experience. [..] Choosing the right audio format is essential for quality and convenience. Understanding audio compression will improve your listening experience. Moving on to the AI generated quizzes with unnecessarily confusing negatives only to find out the AI slop is just flat out wrong: True or false. MP3 files cannot achieve higher quality than WAV files. I pick "true" and get "Incorrect: MP3 files can provide good quality for casual listening, but WAV is superior." Edit: Also be careful with the images, it dropped one into my presentation that I found had been taken from a PDF on the web without attribution.
- hnpolicestate 2y ago
  Yes. "Audio compression is vital for efficient sound management" should be more specific, like "audio compression saves storage space on your device by reducing the size of your audio file without a noticeable reduction in sound quality"
- slidehero 2y ago
  These are all fair points, no doubt. Respectfully, my response is that teachers are highly trained professionals and most of us take the job very seriously. The teacher generating the presentation will review the content for accuracy before presenting it, no different than a teacher suggesting links or YouTube videos for students to use as a basis for research. All the content and activities are editable and after an Undergrad and often a Masters, I feel that the teacher is perfectly qualified to make any adjustments necessary. I do understand your sentiment though.
  - 2y ago
hnpolicestate 2y ago
I'm going to play around with this and most likely share with my teacher colleagues. Can the slide be saved locally? What extension is it?
- slidehero 2y ago
  That's wonderful! I greatly appreciate it. >Can the slide be saved locally? What extension is it? Yes and No, the slides can be exported to HTML and viewed locally, but must be edited via the SlideHero interface. I considered exporting to PowerPoint, but there are just too many features like the quizzes and cloze activites that are just not possible to export to another tool. Teachers can share slides though, and all shared slides are hosted on www.edslides.com Please let me know if you need any additional help. My email is "eli AT slidehero.ai"
  - cube00 2y ago
    This feels incredibility risky, especially given you're expecting users to put in their own efforts editing the slides. That could all disappear tomorrow if you decide to wind up this business.
    - slidehero 2y ago
      I should clarify, there is a facility to export to HTML for archiving purposes so a teacher would never lose the slides they created, however editing is only within the interface.
uncleyoung 2y ago
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ramoz 2y ago
A few pivots/features away and you'll have created a more hands on deepresearch.
- slidehero 2y ago
  haha, who knows what the future holds? :)
deleted 2y ago
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pratikshelar871 2y ago
Awesome work launching the product. You have built a very good tool as a solo dev. the slides are very text heavy. Please use a better image model to convert the text into illustration something like napkin.ai I really like the quiz with word search generator. This could be a simple niche which other LMS's might not be targeting. Could be a good side project to a simple tool. One more feedback as ex AI startup builder. When building the product we are in an adrenalin rush to build the coolest features hoping that customers will use it right away if it solves a problem. After launching we realise thats not the case. They only come if the pain is really bad, like there is no alternative. A easy way to workaround this is to build integrations rather than full fledged UI . If you build an integration for existing LMS, the customer will be more likely to try it than a new tool which will have to go through the ardous procurement process of school or any organisation.
- j45 2y ago
  Information heavy slides can have their place - distribution, and are quite often used in management consulting type sales.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Information-heavy slides have their place when you're also handing paper printouts to everyone present - otherwise knowledge transfer to any individual gets limited by both their working memory and by how sharp their vision is vs. how far are they for the screen. This is really bad in school setting in particular, as kids may not even realize they find the slides boring just because they're sitting too far back.
    - j45 2y ago
      The information heavy slides are usually the handout. I have also seen McKinsey style slides be information heavy, work fine on screenshares. It's important to remember a stereotype of presentations is sparsely focused pitch decks needing to be the only format for everything. I like this format a lot, but would be missing certain opportunities where it comes up incredibly short, because people don't remember 50% twenty minutes later.
fanssex 2y ago
Good job! Reminds me of https://pageon.ai/ https://pageon.ai/, which is VC funded and shows there's interets in this space. Pageon.ai seems more polished but I think it's made by a Chinese company with some weird messaging that aim to make them appear to be a western startup, so proceed with caution if you wanna give it try
dockerd 2y ago
Pretty cool man! I generated presentation on Amazon leadership principle - just for fun and it pretty much described it. The UI and everything is quite well. For marketing, you can keep 1-2 free shares atleast so that people can share it - I could have shared the generated link here - or people can discuss with their business partner and evaluate if they want to pay for it.
- dockerd 2y ago
  Seems like I can share - https://www.edslides.com/slides/view?s=PCVX3525 https://www.edslides.com/slides/view?s=PCVX3525 The sign-up pricing page is confusing. It lists a pro plan with unlimited sharing, but don't mention a comparison to the free plan, which also allows sharing. Seeing the pop-up, I thought sharing wasn't possible in free plan.
  - slidehero 2y ago
    Thanks for the feedback, yes all the features are available and users can create up 2 projects before being prompted to upgrade. I'll amend the messaging to make that clearer.
_puk 2y ago
This is great to see, thanks. There's so much time spent (dare I say wasted) on building and tweaking materials by teachers that it feels like an area AI can make a huge impact, directly improving the quality of life for a large number. Not sure what it's like in Australia, but in the UK many teachers are expected to create materials in their own time (or just don't have enough time in the day to do so). Oftentimes it's something that's been taught previously, but the teacher has a learning objective in mind, and so needs to tweak the existing presentation. Love seeing some focus in this area.
- slidehero 2y ago
  >on building and tweaking materials by teachers that it feels like an area AI can make a huge impact Yes absolutely. Teachers are swamped with having to create learning materials all the time and that's how SlideHero started off. I was using ChatGPT to help me brainstorm and draft content and the penny dropped that creating a structured presentation tool would be a huge win. I've used it a lot in my classes and it has been a huge timesaver.
  - vasco 2y ago
    > Teachers are swamped with having to create learning materials all the time In my country my teachers read from the class book, and we did exercises from the book, and tests were almost exactly the same from year to year. What materials are being redone all the time? Primary school level knowledge is almost static, no?
    - slidehero 2y ago
      I can only speak for Australia, but here "teaching from the textbook" is highly frowned upon. You're expected to constantly be reviewing and revising content from year to year and teachers are heavily pressured to continually revise course content. This is great to match student needs, but it is overwhelming for teachers. >Primary school level knowledge is almost static, no? yes of course, but there are a thousand different ways you can explain and structure any given topic with one approach working for some students and not for others.
teruakohatu 2y ago
I am extremely impressed, especially so if this is a side project. I can easily see this being used in the tertiary education sector, as a starting point when developing decks in introductory classes.
- slidehero 2y ago
  >I am extremely impressed Thank you so much! I've definitely poured my heart and soul into the project :) >I can easily see this being used in the tertiary education sector, as a starting point when developing decks in introductory classes. That's a great suggestion. My background is k-12, so I'm not familiar with how SlideHero might be suitable in tertiary ed, but I'll definitely look into it.
MeteorMarc 2y ago
Nominative determinism at play? You call yourself Eli like in ELI5 (explain like I'm 5 years old).
- slidehero 2y ago
  haha I never thought of that :)
DanHulton 2y ago
I have a rule regarding AI created content: if you can't be arsed to write it, I can't be arsed to read it. A good presentation is INFINITELY better than a mediocre one. I'm sure we've all seen really good slides before, the kind created to explicitly go along with a talk or a lesson, that have a minimum of extra text for the presenter to read at a slightly different speed than you are reading internally, etc. These lessons are memorable, as is the content. Mediocre presentations? I've been through hundreds, and I cannot remember a one. AI Generated slides are almost exclusively going to be able to create only one of these kinds of presentation, because creating a GOOD one requires a deep understanding of the matter, a cohesive plan and direction for the talk to go, and the ability to imbue your personality into the slides as well, so they're complimentary to the lesson. I know teachers are swamped with too much work and not enough time to do it in, but this feels like the classic Technologists curse - seeing a social issue and immediately reaching for a technological answer. I mean, what if the answer is fighting to get more teachers with more time available to prepare their classroom materials, not tools to help them accept the status quo, and that empower those that are working to keep teachers underpaid and overworked?
- slidehero 2y ago
  >if you can't be arsed to write it, I can't be arsed to read it I don't write my own textbooks either ;) The fact is that the slides are just an aid. Teaching is performance art. A good teacher uses slides as a handy scaffold, the magic happens in person, when the teacher *presents* >A good presentation is INFINITELY better than a mediocre one. of course, and perfect is the enemy of good. I know it would be nice for every lesson and every presentation to be absolute perfection, but that does slightly conflict with reality. >creating a GOOD one requires a deep understanding of the matter which teachers have >, a cohesive plan and direction for the talk to go, which teachers have spent decades perfecting >and the ability to imbue your personality into the slides as well, so they're complimentary to the lesson. Yes of course. I think there's a slight mismatch with regard to how you're perceiving the tool. The AI generated content is more of a starting point. As a teacher I'm constantly refining adding to and removing content from *all* the resources I collect. There is no one-size fits all. It's no different with SlideHero. I'll give an example. I've taught introductory Computer Systems to year 9 students 2 times per year to around 4 classes a semester for about 20 years. That's probably close to 200 times I've deliverd that course. I can teach the content in my sleep. I still find it useful to generate a slideshow because a) it's 99% faster for me to review the content than it is to write it by hand, b) there are areas like networking that I just don't enjoy so much and GPT does a better job than I do here and c) interestingly gpt will surface new ideas and perspectives I hadn't considered before! Remember that the slides are fully editable. There is little expectation that a teacher will hit "generate" and present exactly what the ai produces. In the exact same way as I'll find a good YouTube video, but won't play it all. I'll skip around to the parts that are relevant to my particular class and sometimes even to a particular cohort. >I know teachers are swamped with too much work and not enough time to do it in, but this feels like the classic Technologists curse Believe me, AI in the classroom is a *massive* force multiplier. Good teachers can be great with AI. >I mean, what if the answer is fighting to get more teachers with more time available to prepare their classroom materials Perfect, but I got a class of year 9 history students tomorrow and I'm teaching a new topic that I'm not familiar with... a little help from ai is going to make my lesson *better* not worse, not least of all becuase I have more time to devote to other areas of prep.
pbhjpbhj 2y ago
Have you considered having slides that teachers have refined uploaded back to the system and made available to use? If suggest keeping only the best, you and the refiner could get a royalty. Essentially, attract them with the AI, retain then with traditional curated [teaching] resource sharing? Does 'use this slideshow but swap the slide about executions for one about fashion' type adaptation work well? If I adapt a slideshow, can I add it to the prompt so a set of questions is generated from it?
- slidehero 2y ago
  yes! a marketplace is on my very near roadmap :)
devgoncalo 2y ago
Congratulations! I feel that you are on to something great. In standalone, chatgpt and other tools are great, but there is something about the visual part of this tool that's a key differentiator. Like a new type of learning. Keep the good work!
- slidehero 2y ago
  Thank you! I really hope so. I've found it super valuable in my own classes and so far the response from other teachers has been very positive :)
tda 2y ago
I love it that I can just try it without signing up or anything, a rarity these days! I asked it to generate slides on a topic I know something about, and in my native language. On the one hand, the result is pretty mediocre, but on the other hand it is truly amazing that one can whip up a presentation on any topic, in any language, in a matter of minutes. I didn't review the result carefully, but already on first glance there was a wrong image, and some pretty ugly use of language. So the quality is below what i would expect. But as a starting point, I can imagine this is a huge time saver for a teacher if they want to discuss a topic spontaneously, and only have 20 minutes to prepare. Even before the rise of AI I see lots of low effort lesson materials being used, where math questions are algorithmically generated by uninspired programmers. Or multiple choice questions where technically multiple answers are correct, but only is accepted. And there is no room for discussing why one option does or does not apply, just a simple right/wrong and next question. So even though ai generated content might be of so-so quality, unfortunately an interactive session with chapgpt is probably much more educational than the ("pre-AI") crap that is sometimes used today
- slidehero 2y ago
  >but already on first glance there was a wrong image Yeah the images are going to be mostly match, but there is a "swap" button to choose more suitable images where the ai has picked poorly. >and some pretty ugly use of language Was this in your native language? I'm not sure how well ChaGPT does outside of English. >But as a starting point, I can imagine this is a huge time saver for a teacher if they want to discuss a topic spontaneously, and only have 20 minutes to prepare. Yes absolutely! This is the goal of SlideHero. >Even before the rise of AI I see lots of low effort lesson materials being used At the end of the day, it is still up to the teacher to create worthwhile resources, this was true before AI and is still true today :) Thank you for your feedback.
  - tda 2y ago
    Indeed swapping the images was easy and intuitive, I should have added that. The "ugly language" was a bit unexpected, as in general the support for Dutch is surprisingly good. Maybe the combination of the prompt and the translation, and the mixed used of languages. Perhaps if all the prompts were translated to a language of choice (an the user would be prompted for a language) it would work better. But maybe you never even considered making a multi-lingual tool, and just out of the box it more or less already supports that. This would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, truly amazing! How do you combine a (full time?) teaching job with building such a tool? It feels way more than some hobby project. Congrats on the release!
JetSetIlly 2y ago
This is a great idea. I've worked as a teacher and I think people severely underestimate the amount of time teachers have to prepare lessons. Anything like this will be seen as a major time saving. I'm not a huge fan of LLMs but I can see how they would be genuinely useful here. That said, I don't think I would use it to create an entire lesson. I think the killer application for this sort of tool is to help create worksheets, plenary activities, etc. If I were still teaching, I would definitely try it out for that. Ideas for the future: If I were you, I would consider making it easier for teachers to share what they've created with each other. Sharing of resources already happens now and it would be great if this tool facilitated sharing of generated content.
- slidehero 2y ago
  >This is a great idea. Thank you. >I've worked as a teacher and I think people severely underestimate the amount of time teachers have to prepare lessons. Yes absolutely. I was spending a lot of time in ChatGPT for brainstorming about a year ago and that's where the idea for SlideHero came about. >That said, I don't think I would use it to create an entire lesson. Agreed, the purpose of SlideHero is not to "take over" a teachers planning and lesson delivery, I've designed it to be an value add, which is why I devoted a fair amount of effort to the additional activites that come with every presentation. >If I were still teaching, I would definitely try it out for that. I'll take that as high praise considering you're not a huge fan of LLMs :) >I would consider making it easier for teachers to share what they've created with each other. Yes for sure. That viral hook is soon to come. I have ideas for a marketplace where teachers can list their presentations and make some money selling them too, but I'm getting a little carried away now ... that's for further down the line.
  - JetSetIlly 2y ago
    > I'll take that as high praise considering you're not a huge fan of LLMs :) Heh:-) I mean to say that I've not really encountered a convincing use case for them before now. From my point of view, your tool is perhaps the closest to a killer application for LLMs that I've seen. If there's one occupation that requires a full-time assistant, it's the high-school teacher. But as we all know, that's an unobtainable luxury so this might be the perfect use for an LLM. > Yes for sure. That viral hook is soon to come. I have ideas for a marketplace where teachers can list their presentations and make some money selling them too, but I'm getting a little carried away now ... that's for further down the line. I wish you all the best in this. It's very inspiring.
mellosouls 2y ago
I feel there's some valid criticism in here that is unfortunately presented in maybe a little too aggressive a tone. OP, I think this is terrific work; there is probably some scope for tuning the curation and quality options, but this is really going to be the case with any AI product of this sort; best of luck with it going forward - its a great start, I think its pretty nifty too!
- slidehero 2y ago
  >I feel there's some valid criticism in here that is unfortunately presented in maybe a little too aggressive a tone. It's all good, I'm a school teacher so I have a thick skin :) >OP, I think this is terrific work; Thank you! >I think its pretty nifty too! :)
zelon88 2y ago
I work in education, and I emplore you to post a Privacy Policy and TOS clearly on the homepage, ASAP. We have so much low hanging fruit in this industry with regards to privacy and security. The website you listed reminds me a lot of other one-dev platforms that aren't properly equipped to deal with their own volume. If you're inviting teachers to add information about their districts and their students, you MUST take your security, your supply chain, and your disclosures seriously. There is not enough experience in my industry to make up the difference. You're going to market this to teachers who sign up without the consent of their IT or data people, enter PII about minor children, and then get fired and that data will be invisible to my department forever. But you'll still have it, ready to lose it in your first big hack or sell it when times get tough. I could list literally 3 other platforms designed by a lonely teacher in their spare time that could literally probably have their databases dumped this afternoon if I posted the links here. Please, be careful.
- slidehero 2y ago
  Fair points and I appreciate the heads up. I'll add those things asap. >If you're inviting teachers to add information about their districts and their students, you MUST take your security, your supply chain, and your disclosures seriously. Definitely not the case with SlideHero. There is no facility to add student names or any school related information. It's purely a slide deck and activity generator. >enter PII about minor children, and then get fired and that data will be invisible to my department forever. That would be very poor judgement on the teacher's part for sure. There are no prompts to enter student data at all in SlideHero, it's really not designed for that. >Please, be careful. 100% agree, I'll add a note to remind users not to add any identifying information, although they'd almost have to be willfully doing it since thats not in line with the purpose of the app. Appreciate the concern though and you make valid points, so I appreciate it.
j_french 2y ago
As an educator, it seems to me that a lot of people here are missing the point that teaching and generating teaching materials are not the same thing. Teaching is actively engaging with the real live (possibly small) humans in the classroom, which includes asking them questions to make them think, promoting discussions, identifying misconceptions etc etc etc. Teaching materials are a resource that support teaching. They're not doing the teaching. The teacher is. OP has put together a nice tool to help them to generate new materials to support their teaching. Good on them!
phupt26 2y ago
awesome & helpful tool
babyent 2y ago
Cool stuff! If you make this collaborative so students could participate in real time together that would be so cool. For example I remember when I was growing up we would split into groups and be given some task. Like in a lab or researching together. I always found those to suck because I wanted to know what the other groups came up with, but we would only focus on our thing. Not sure if that is useful or not.
vunderba 2y ago
There's quite a few tools in the education sector for using AI to generate educational materials such as slides, quizzes, etc. - TeachMateAI - Magic School AI - Brisk Teaching If I were you I'd focus on the "interactive activities" part to try to distinguish your tool - stuff like word jumbles, word search, crosswords, fill-ins, etc. I worked as an ESL teacher for years overseas and many schools expect their teachers to craft their own activities/worksheets/games/etc. I could possibly see this having value in that area as well. EDIT: A lot of recommendations in the thread around using this to craft employee training materials. Given how crowded the education sector is, it might be worth exploring this space more than K-12.
ujkiolp 2y ago
OP seems to be a great salesman, I’m sure the product will go on to be successful. As for the students.. well, I hope they supplement their education with other than school material
deleted 2y ago
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suicidalfailure 2y ago
Wish it worked for other languages, tried it in French but it outputs in English. Good job on this tool! I will be certain to use it in the near future
somethingsome 2y ago
I honestly don't get slides for high school? Is it effective to teach? Or just easier to teach? In my education we copied the black board by hand, and that allowed us to learn how to summarize information. Writing by hand also improved memory. And seeing the teacher thinking and choosing how to present the information in real time had a lot of value. Further I find it way more difficult to make a slide presentation that effectively teach something than only having a blackboard that forces us to really explain the steps. At uni I teach with slides, but they are done in a way that mimics blackboard writing. It takes an enormous amount of time to make them, but the students are very happy. What are your opinions?

260 points by slidehero 2y ago

ako 2y ago

Tried it with Firefox on an iPad. Could not get past the pop up dialog when opening the page, the ok button is below the fold, and I can’t scroll the page up.

slidehero 2y ago
Thanks for the heads up. Tbh, the editor is not completely usable on Mobile, there are some interactions that I still need to polish up to make more mobile friendly.

OccamsMirror 2y ago

Pretty cool! Would it work for primary school teachers?

slidehero 2y ago
Thank you, yes there is an option to choose student age from kindy through to adult. GPT does a great job of choosing language suitable for the target student age. It's actually kind of fun to generate presentations for e.g. Quantum mechanics and target a year 1 aged audience hehe :) produces some surprisingly insightful content.

TKAU 2y ago

Very cool! There is a python library called manim that's used to create math animations, maybe could get ChatGPT to write code and integrate some animation videos into the presentations to help visualize some math ideas.

slidehero 2y ago
thank you for the tip, this looks like an awesome library! :)
rahimnathwani 2y ago
It's tricky to get ChatGPT (even with o1 pro) to generate good manim code: https://x.com/RahimNathwani/status/1901771994397622357?t=LGOYULUomQNPhTC6dqmRng&s=19 https://x.com/RahimNathwani/status/1901771994397622357?t=LGO...
- champdebloom 2y ago
  Have you tried with Claude? I recall seeing a tweet with impressive results.
  - rahimnathwani 2y ago
    I tried this prompt on o1 pro, sonnet 3.7 extended, and o3-mini-high: "Create code for a manim video that shows how to do the long division algorithm." None of them gave satisfactory results. (They all provided code that 'worked' in the sense that it created a valid video file.)
- Secretmapper 2y ago
  There was a paper recently that tackled this: https://tiger-ai-lab.github.io/TheoremExplainAgent/ https://tiger-ai-lab.github.io/TheoremExplainAgent/

gus_massa 2y ago

It has more features than what I expected. Can you share some details bout the tech stack and how you wrote it? I autogenerated some slides. Who is paying the tokens? They are nice, but I have two suggestions: In my opinion, they have too much text. I prefer shorter text in slides. I alfo got white text on a black rectangle over a light blue background. I'd prefer a version without the black rectangle.

slidehero 2y ago
>It has more features than what I expected. appreciate it >Can you share some details bout the tech stack and how you wrote it? I'm old school, it's php on the back and vanilla JS on the front with JQ for basic dom manipulation, Node and socket.io for the chatgpt back and forth. >Who is paying the tokens? Me for now :) >In my opinion, they have too much text. I prefer shorter text in slides. fair point. I generate a little extra so that the teacher can remove the content that is not relevant. I'm a classroom teacher, so I personally use the slides as a way to cover basics and then to give to students who are absent to catch up (happens a lot). >I alfo got white text on a black rectangle over a light blue background. There is a "Themes" buttons which offers about a dozen premade themes and then customization for all aspects of the slides (paragraph, true/false, images etc). It's pretty quick to find a style that appeals to you. Thanks for your feedback.
- gus_massa 2y ago
  I was thinking about slides for conferences. (I tested with the word "banana" anyway.) In conferences, walls of text is a very common design error. I teach math in the first year of the university. When I started, One very useful recomendation was: > Whater you write in the blackboard, they will copy in their paper notebook and may read and learn some day later. > Whaterver you only say, goes away with the wind. So I try to write down in the blackboard everithing I say. So slides for a classroom shoud have more text than what I usually expect.
  - slidehero 2y ago
    I appreciate that. It's hard to find the perfect balance.

GlacierFox 2y ago

Hey, pretty cool! Good going for building all that out yourself, have you worked in Web-tech or anything before?

slidehero 2y ago
Thanks. Yes I worked in web dev 22 years ago after graduating with a CS degree. I've been a high school teacher for over 20 years now though. I've always had side projects on the boil though as I love web dev and try to keep up with changes in the field.
- replwoacause 2y ago
  Impressive! Congrats on launching.
  - slidehero 2y ago
    Thank you!

topbenteacher 2y ago

This looks great, Eli. I'm an Australian software developer in the midst of changing careers into primary school teaching at the moment. I still check Hacker News every day out of habit. Perhaps the overlap is stronger than you think! I've recently worked on my own AI-assisted learning site to scratch my own itch for learning the Ukrainian language: https://naholosy.com https://naholosy.com . Nothing in the primary learning space yet... However, I'm also in the final year of a masters and will be producing a self-study on how to leverage my software background to improve teaching outcomes for Australian teachers. I've been thinking about the various ways that I might use my knowledge of students' progression and misconceptions in order to generate tailored exercises to help them whilst saving the labour of manually fitting to a template. Your work looks VERY highly aligned with the sorts of things I might want to do. I would love to reach out to you in the future and discuss your approaches and/or possible ways to collaborate. I'll drop you an email when I can. My own is topbenteacher AT protonmail.com

deleted 2y ago
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slidehero 2y ago
Thanks! >I'm an Australian software developer in the midst of changing careers into primary school teaching at the moment. I still check Hacker News every day out of habit. Perhaps the overlap is stronger than you think! That's fantastic I hope the study is going well and you're enjoying the change. The classroom is so different to office work - hectic, but very rewarding too. I've done a decent amount of primary teaching too and enjoyed it a lot. > a self-study on how to leverage my software background to improve teaching outcomes for Australian teachers. Excellent! There are so many ways in which teachers can be supported with software, I think you'll find this rewarding to explore. >I would love to reach out to you in the future and discuss your approaches and/or possible ways to collaborate. Of course! I'd love to chat. You can reach me at eli AT slidehero DOT ai

sergiotapia 2y ago

potential to be the bingocardcreator.com for teachers, if you market this right. nice job!

slidehero 2y ago
haha I can only hope! I've taken Patrick's bingo card advice and now working hard to generate content to hopefully catch some of that long tail traffic :) >if you market this right I'm muddling around as best I can with marketing, hopefully I can work it out.

harshnigam 2y ago

That's awesome. While being focused is good, do you see yourself expanding to more levels of academia? It was just today I was looking into solutions such as reveal.js, curious what worked for you the best?

slidehero 2y ago
>While being focused is good, do you see yourself expanding to more levels of academia? Possibly. At this point I'm a one man band, so I'm sticking to what I know best. I'm finding a strong positive reaction from teachers, so I'm quietly hoping that I've hit on something that resonates. I think the app can be repurposed for either academia as you mention or possibly other fields, but I'm just taking it one step ata time for now. >It was just today I was looking into solutions such as reveal.js, curious what worked for you the best? I'm aware of reveal, but I decided to roll my own solution which has so far worked out well.

julienmarie 2y ago

That's amazing. That could also be used for training employees. Just made a test for our use case and the results are pretty good! I have an ecommerce company selling fine food and one major issue is training our employees with deep fine food knowledge. Coupled with a RAG / Internal documentation, it could generate training material s for also internal procedures, etc... One thing I noticed, is there is a lot of repetition of the same concepts in the slides generated. It would be great to be able to tweak the outline before it generates the slides. But all in all, really great stuff! Congratulations!

slidehero 2y ago
Thank you. >That could also be used for training employees. Yes! You're absolutely right. I have ideas about how the existing framwork can be repurposed and what you suggest is exactly right. >Coupled with a RAG / Internal documentation, it could generate training material s for also internal procedures, etc... Yeah spot on. >One thing I noticed, is there is a lot of repetition of the same concepts in the slides generated. Thanks for the feedback. I'll continue to tweak the prompts.

cube00 2y ago

It's heart breaking to think a whole generation will soon be brought up on learning from AI generated slop. Here's my attempt at using this tool: Learning Intention: To understand the differences between MP3 and WAV audio formats and the concept of audio compression. What does AI give us? Rambling text that adds nothing to progress a student's learning intention: Each format has its own strengths and weaknesses, which may affect your listening experience. [..] Choosing between them depends on your needs, whether you value quality or convenience. On a later slide in the same presentation the more rambling appears: Audio compression is vital for efficient sound management. Knowing different types of audio can enhance your media experience. [..] Choosing the right audio format is essential for quality and convenience. Understanding audio compression will improve your listening experience. Moving on to the AI generated quizzes with unnecessarily confusing negatives only to find out the AI slop is just flat out wrong: True or false. MP3 files cannot achieve higher quality than WAV files. I pick "true" and get "Incorrect: MP3 files can provide good quality for casual listening, but WAV is superior." Edit: Also be careful with the images, it dropped one into my presentation that I found had been taken from a PDF on the web without attribution.

hnpolicestate 2y ago
Yes. "Audio compression is vital for efficient sound management" should be more specific, like "audio compression saves storage space on your device by reducing the size of your audio file without a noticeable reduction in sound quality"
slidehero 2y ago
These are all fair points, no doubt. Respectfully, my response is that teachers are highly trained professionals and most of us take the job very seriously. The teacher generating the presentation will review the content for accuracy before presenting it, no different than a teacher suggesting links or YouTube videos for students to use as a basis for research. All the content and activities are editable and after an Undergrad and often a Masters, I feel that the teacher is perfectly qualified to make any adjustments necessary. I do understand your sentiment though.
- 2y ago

hnpolicestate 2y ago

I'm going to play around with this and most likely share with my teacher colleagues. Can the slide be saved locally? What extension is it?

slidehero 2y ago
That's wonderful! I greatly appreciate it. >Can the slide be saved locally? What extension is it? Yes and No, the slides can be exported to HTML and viewed locally, but must be edited via the SlideHero interface. I considered exporting to PowerPoint, but there are just too many features like the quizzes and cloze activites that are just not possible to export to another tool. Teachers can share slides though, and all shared slides are hosted on www.edslides.com Please let me know if you need any additional help. My email is "eli AT slidehero.ai"
- cube00 2y ago
  This feels incredibility risky, especially given you're expecting users to put in their own efforts editing the slides. That could all disappear tomorrow if you decide to wind up this business.
  - slidehero 2y ago
    I should clarify, there is a facility to export to HTML for archiving purposes so a teacher would never lose the slides they created, however editing is only within the interface.

uncleyoung 2y ago

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ramoz 2y ago

A few pivots/features away and you'll have created a more hands on deepresearch.

slidehero 2y ago
haha, who knows what the future holds? :)

deleted 2y ago

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pratikshelar871 2y ago

Awesome work launching the product. You have built a very good tool as a solo dev. the slides are very text heavy. Please use a better image model to convert the text into illustration something like napkin.ai I really like the quiz with word search generator. This could be a simple niche which other LMS's might not be targeting. Could be a good side project to a simple tool. One more feedback as ex AI startup builder. When building the product we are in an adrenalin rush to build the coolest features hoping that customers will use it right away if it solves a problem. After launching we realise thats not the case. They only come if the pain is really bad, like there is no alternative. A easy way to workaround this is to build integrations rather than full fledged UI . If you build an integration for existing LMS, the customer will be more likely to try it than a new tool which will have to go through the ardous procurement process of school or any organisation.

j45 2y ago
Information heavy slides can have their place - distribution, and are quite often used in management consulting type sales.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Information-heavy slides have their place when you're also handing paper printouts to everyone present - otherwise knowledge transfer to any individual gets limited by both their working memory and by how sharp their vision is vs. how far are they for the screen. This is really bad in school setting in particular, as kids may not even realize they find the slides boring just because they're sitting too far back.
  - j45 2y ago
    The information heavy slides are usually the handout. I have also seen McKinsey style slides be information heavy, work fine on screenshares. It's important to remember a stereotype of presentations is sparsely focused pitch decks needing to be the only format for everything. I like this format a lot, but would be missing certain opportunities where it comes up incredibly short, because people don't remember 50% twenty minutes later.

fanssex 2y ago

Good job! Reminds me of https://pageon.ai/ https://pageon.ai/, which is VC funded and shows there's interets in this space. Pageon.ai seems more polished but I think it's made by a Chinese company with some weird messaging that aim to make them appear to be a western startup, so proceed with caution if you wanna give it try

dockerd 2y ago

Pretty cool man! I generated presentation on Amazon leadership principle - just for fun and it pretty much described it. The UI and everything is quite well. For marketing, you can keep 1-2 free shares atleast so that people can share it - I could have shared the generated link here - or people can discuss with their business partner and evaluate if they want to pay for it.

dockerd 2y ago
Seems like I can share - https://www.edslides.com/slides/view?s=PCVX3525 https://www.edslides.com/slides/view?s=PCVX3525 The sign-up pricing page is confusing. It lists a pro plan with unlimited sharing, but don't mention a comparison to the free plan, which also allows sharing. Seeing the pop-up, I thought sharing wasn't possible in free plan.
- slidehero 2y ago
  Thanks for the feedback, yes all the features are available and users can create up 2 projects before being prompted to upgrade. I'll amend the messaging to make that clearer.

_puk 2y ago

This is great to see, thanks. There's so much time spent (dare I say wasted) on building and tweaking materials by teachers that it feels like an area AI can make a huge impact, directly improving the quality of life for a large number. Not sure what it's like in Australia, but in the UK many teachers are expected to create materials in their own time (or just don't have enough time in the day to do so). Oftentimes it's something that's been taught previously, but the teacher has a learning objective in mind, and so needs to tweak the existing presentation. Love seeing some focus in this area.

slidehero 2y ago
>on building and tweaking materials by teachers that it feels like an area AI can make a huge impact Yes absolutely. Teachers are swamped with having to create learning materials all the time and that's how SlideHero started off. I was using ChatGPT to help me brainstorm and draft content and the penny dropped that creating a structured presentation tool would be a huge win. I've used it a lot in my classes and it has been a huge timesaver.
- vasco 2y ago
  > Teachers are swamped with having to create learning materials all the time In my country my teachers read from the class book, and we did exercises from the book, and tests were almost exactly the same from year to year. What materials are being redone all the time? Primary school level knowledge is almost static, no?
  - slidehero 2y ago
    I can only speak for Australia, but here "teaching from the textbook" is highly frowned upon. You're expected to constantly be reviewing and revising content from year to year and teachers are heavily pressured to continually revise course content. This is great to match student needs, but it is overwhelming for teachers. >Primary school level knowledge is almost static, no? yes of course, but there are a thousand different ways you can explain and structure any given topic with one approach working for some students and not for others.

teruakohatu 2y ago

I am extremely impressed, especially so if this is a side project. I can easily see this being used in the tertiary education sector, as a starting point when developing decks in introductory classes.

slidehero 2y ago
>I am extremely impressed Thank you so much! I've definitely poured my heart and soul into the project :) >I can easily see this being used in the tertiary education sector, as a starting point when developing decks in introductory classes. That's a great suggestion. My background is k-12, so I'm not familiar with how SlideHero might be suitable in tertiary ed, but I'll definitely look into it.

MeteorMarc 2y ago

Nominative determinism at play? You call yourself Eli like in ELI5 (explain like I'm 5 years old).

slidehero 2y ago
haha I never thought of that :)

DanHulton 2y ago

I have a rule regarding AI created content: if you can't be arsed to write it, I can't be arsed to read it. A good presentation is INFINITELY better than a mediocre one. I'm sure we've all seen really good slides before, the kind created to explicitly go along with a talk or a lesson, that have a minimum of extra text for the presenter to read at a slightly different speed than you are reading internally, etc. These lessons are memorable, as is the content. Mediocre presentations? I've been through hundreds, and I cannot remember a one. AI Generated slides are almost exclusively going to be able to create only one of these kinds of presentation, because creating a GOOD one requires a deep understanding of the matter, a cohesive plan and direction for the talk to go, and the ability to imbue your personality into the slides as well, so they're complimentary to the lesson. I know teachers are swamped with too much work and not enough time to do it in, but this feels like the classic Technologists curse - seeing a social issue and immediately reaching for a technological answer. I mean, what if the answer is fighting to get more teachers with more time available to prepare their classroom materials, not tools to help them accept the status quo, and that empower those that are working to keep teachers underpaid and overworked?

slidehero 2y ago
>if you can't be arsed to write it, I can't be arsed to read it I don't write my own textbooks either ;) The fact is that the slides are just an aid. Teaching is performance art. A good teacher uses slides as a handy scaffold, the magic happens in person, when the teacher *presents* >A good presentation is INFINITELY better than a mediocre one. of course, and perfect is the enemy of good. I know it would be nice for every lesson and every presentation to be absolute perfection, but that does slightly conflict with reality. >creating a GOOD one requires a deep understanding of the matter which teachers have >, a cohesive plan and direction for the talk to go, which teachers have spent decades perfecting >and the ability to imbue your personality into the slides as well, so they're complimentary to the lesson. Yes of course. I think there's a slight mismatch with regard to how you're perceiving the tool. The AI generated content is more of a starting point. As a teacher I'm constantly refining adding to and removing content from *all* the resources I collect. There is no one-size fits all. It's no different with SlideHero. I'll give an example. I've taught introductory Computer Systems to year 9 students 2 times per year to around 4 classes a semester for about 20 years. That's probably close to 200 times I've deliverd that course. I can teach the content in my sleep. I still find it useful to generate a slideshow because a) it's 99% faster for me to review the content than it is to write it by hand, b) there are areas like networking that I just don't enjoy so much and GPT does a better job than I do here and c) interestingly gpt will surface new ideas and perspectives I hadn't considered before! Remember that the slides are fully editable. There is little expectation that a teacher will hit "generate" and present exactly what the ai produces. In the exact same way as I'll find a good YouTube video, but won't play it all. I'll skip around to the parts that are relevant to my particular class and sometimes even to a particular cohort. >I know teachers are swamped with too much work and not enough time to do it in, but this feels like the classic Technologists curse Believe me, AI in the classroom is a *massive* force multiplier. Good teachers can be great with AI. >I mean, what if the answer is fighting to get more teachers with more time available to prepare their classroom materials Perfect, but I got a class of year 9 history students tomorrow and I'm teaching a new topic that I'm not familiar with... a little help from ai is going to make my lesson *better* not worse, not least of all becuase I have more time to devote to other areas of prep.

pbhjpbhj 2y ago

Have you considered having slides that teachers have refined uploaded back to the system and made available to use? If suggest keeping only the best, you and the refiner could get a royalty. Essentially, attract them with the AI, retain then with traditional curated [teaching] resource sharing? Does 'use this slideshow but swap the slide about executions for one about fashion' type adaptation work well? If I adapt a slideshow, can I add it to the prompt so a set of questions is generated from it?

slidehero 2y ago
yes! a marketplace is on my very near roadmap :)

devgoncalo 2y ago

Congratulations! I feel that you are on to something great. In standalone, chatgpt and other tools are great, but there is something about the visual part of this tool that's a key differentiator. Like a new type of learning. Keep the good work!

slidehero 2y ago
Thank you! I really hope so. I've found it super valuable in my own classes and so far the response from other teachers has been very positive :)

tda 2y ago

I love it that I can just try it without signing up or anything, a rarity these days! I asked it to generate slides on a topic I know something about, and in my native language. On the one hand, the result is pretty mediocre, but on the other hand it is truly amazing that one can whip up a presentation on any topic, in any language, in a matter of minutes. I didn't review the result carefully, but already on first glance there was a wrong image, and some pretty ugly use of language. So the quality is below what i would expect. But as a starting point, I can imagine this is a huge time saver for a teacher if they want to discuss a topic spontaneously, and only have 20 minutes to prepare. Even before the rise of AI I see lots of low effort lesson materials being used, where math questions are algorithmically generated by uninspired programmers. Or multiple choice questions where technically multiple answers are correct, but only is accepted. And there is no room for discussing why one option does or does not apply, just a simple right/wrong and next question. So even though ai generated content might be of so-so quality, unfortunately an interactive session with chapgpt is probably much more educational than the ("pre-AI") crap that is sometimes used today

slidehero 2y ago
>but already on first glance there was a wrong image Yeah the images are going to be mostly match, but there is a "swap" button to choose more suitable images where the ai has picked poorly. >and some pretty ugly use of language Was this in your native language? I'm not sure how well ChaGPT does outside of English. >But as a starting point, I can imagine this is a huge time saver for a teacher if they want to discuss a topic spontaneously, and only have 20 minutes to prepare. Yes absolutely! This is the goal of SlideHero. >Even before the rise of AI I see lots of low effort lesson materials being used At the end of the day, it is still up to the teacher to create worthwhile resources, this was true before AI and is still true today :) Thank you for your feedback.
- tda 2y ago
  Indeed swapping the images was easy and intuitive, I should have added that. The "ugly language" was a bit unexpected, as in general the support for Dutch is surprisingly good. Maybe the combination of the prompt and the translation, and the mixed used of languages. Perhaps if all the prompts were translated to a language of choice (an the user would be prompted for a language) it would work better. But maybe you never even considered making a multi-lingual tool, and just out of the box it more or less already supports that. This would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, truly amazing! How do you combine a (full time?) teaching job with building such a tool? It feels way more than some hobby project. Congrats on the release!

JetSetIlly 2y ago

This is a great idea. I've worked as a teacher and I think people severely underestimate the amount of time teachers have to prepare lessons. Anything like this will be seen as a major time saving. I'm not a huge fan of LLMs but I can see how they would be genuinely useful here. That said, I don't think I would use it to create an entire lesson. I think the killer application for this sort of tool is to help create worksheets, plenary activities, etc. If I were still teaching, I would definitely try it out for that. Ideas for the future: If I were you, I would consider making it easier for teachers to share what they've created with each other. Sharing of resources already happens now and it would be great if this tool facilitated sharing of generated content.

slidehero 2y ago
>This is a great idea. Thank you. >I've worked as a teacher and I think people severely underestimate the amount of time teachers have to prepare lessons. Yes absolutely. I was spending a lot of time in ChatGPT for brainstorming about a year ago and that's where the idea for SlideHero came about. >That said, I don't think I would use it to create an entire lesson. Agreed, the purpose of SlideHero is not to "take over" a teachers planning and lesson delivery, I've designed it to be an value add, which is why I devoted a fair amount of effort to the additional activites that come with every presentation. >If I were still teaching, I would definitely try it out for that. I'll take that as high praise considering you're not a huge fan of LLMs :) >I would consider making it easier for teachers to share what they've created with each other. Yes for sure. That viral hook is soon to come. I have ideas for a marketplace where teachers can list their presentations and make some money selling them too, but I'm getting a little carried away now ... that's for further down the line.
- JetSetIlly 2y ago
  > I'll take that as high praise considering you're not a huge fan of LLMs :) Heh:-) I mean to say that I've not really encountered a convincing use case for them before now. From my point of view, your tool is perhaps the closest to a killer application for LLMs that I've seen. If there's one occupation that requires a full-time assistant, it's the high-school teacher. But as we all know, that's an unobtainable luxury so this might be the perfect use for an LLM. > Yes for sure. That viral hook is soon to come. I have ideas for a marketplace where teachers can list their presentations and make some money selling them too, but I'm getting a little carried away now ... that's for further down the line. I wish you all the best in this. It's very inspiring.

mellosouls 2y ago

I feel there's some valid criticism in here that is unfortunately presented in maybe a little too aggressive a tone. OP, I think this is terrific work; there is probably some scope for tuning the curation and quality options, but this is really going to be the case with any AI product of this sort; best of luck with it going forward - its a great start, I think its pretty nifty too!

slidehero 2y ago
>I feel there's some valid criticism in here that is unfortunately presented in maybe a little too aggressive a tone. It's all good, I'm a school teacher so I have a thick skin :) >OP, I think this is terrific work; Thank you! >I think its pretty nifty too! :)

zelon88 2y ago

I work in education, and I emplore you to post a Privacy Policy and TOS clearly on the homepage, ASAP. We have so much low hanging fruit in this industry with regards to privacy and security. The website you listed reminds me a lot of other one-dev platforms that aren't properly equipped to deal with their own volume. If you're inviting teachers to add information about their districts and their students, you MUST take your security, your supply chain, and your disclosures seriously. There is not enough experience in my industry to make up the difference. You're going to market this to teachers who sign up without the consent of their IT or data people, enter PII about minor children, and then get fired and that data will be invisible to my department forever. But you'll still have it, ready to lose it in your first big hack or sell it when times get tough. I could list literally 3 other platforms designed by a lonely teacher in their spare time that could literally probably have their databases dumped this afternoon if I posted the links here. Please, be careful.

slidehero 2y ago
Fair points and I appreciate the heads up. I'll add those things asap. >If you're inviting teachers to add information about their districts and their students, you MUST take your security, your supply chain, and your disclosures seriously. Definitely not the case with SlideHero. There is no facility to add student names or any school related information. It's purely a slide deck and activity generator. >enter PII about minor children, and then get fired and that data will be invisible to my department forever. That would be very poor judgement on the teacher's part for sure. There are no prompts to enter student data at all in SlideHero, it's really not designed for that. >Please, be careful. 100% agree, I'll add a note to remind users not to add any identifying information, although they'd almost have to be willfully doing it since thats not in line with the purpose of the app. Appreciate the concern though and you make valid points, so I appreciate it.

j_french 2y ago

As an educator, it seems to me that a lot of people here are missing the point that teaching and generating teaching materials are not the same thing. Teaching is actively engaging with the real live (possibly small) humans in the classroom, which includes asking them questions to make them think, promoting discussions, identifying misconceptions etc etc etc. Teaching materials are a resource that support teaching. They're not doing the teaching. The teacher is. OP has put together a nice tool to help them to generate new materials to support their teaching. Good on them!

phupt26 2y ago

awesome & helpful tool

babyent 2y ago

Cool stuff! If you make this collaborative so students could participate in real time together that would be so cool. For example I remember when I was growing up we would split into groups and be given some task. Like in a lab or researching together. I always found those to suck because I wanted to know what the other groups came up with, but we would only focus on our thing. Not sure if that is useful or not.

vunderba 2y ago

There's quite a few tools in the education sector for using AI to generate educational materials such as slides, quizzes, etc. - TeachMateAI - Magic School AI - Brisk Teaching If I were you I'd focus on the "interactive activities" part to try to distinguish your tool - stuff like word jumbles, word search, crosswords, fill-ins, etc. I worked as an ESL teacher for years overseas and many schools expect their teachers to craft their own activities/worksheets/games/etc. I could possibly see this having value in that area as well. EDIT: A lot of recommendations in the thread around using this to craft employee training materials. Given how crowded the education sector is, it might be worth exploring this space more than K-12.

ujkiolp 2y ago

OP seems to be a great salesman, I’m sure the product will go on to be successful. As for the students.. well, I hope they supplement their education with other than school material

deleted 2y ago

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suicidalfailure 2y ago

Wish it worked for other languages, tried it in French but it outputs in English. Good job on this tool! I will be certain to use it in the near future

somethingsome 2y ago

I honestly don't get slides for high school? Is it effective to teach? Or just easier to teach? In my education we copied the black board by hand, and that allowed us to learn how to summarize information. Writing by hand also improved memory. And seeing the teacher thinking and choosing how to present the information in real time had a lot of value. Further I find it way more difficult to make a slide presentation that effectively teach something than only having a blackboard that forces us to really explain the steps. At uni I teach with slides, but they are done in a way that mimics blackboard writing. It takes an enormous amount of time to make them, but the students are very happy. What are your opinions?