Show HN: I'm a teacher and built an AI presentation tool
113 comments
·March 23, 2025mellosouls
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
>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!
:)
pratikshelar871
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
Information heavy slides can have their place - distribution, and are quite often used in management consulting type sales.
TeMPOraL
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
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.
cube00
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.
slidehero
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.
cube00
> The teacher generating the presentation will review the content for accuracy before presenting it
First header on front page: "Craft Engaging Lessons in Minutes."
Further down: "Seriously. You will be done prepping a full lesson in minutes instead of hours"
If we're no longer "crafting in minutes" then you might consider the disclaimers that ChatGPT adds warning that all content must be thoroughly reviewed by a suitably qualified professional.
Rather then blanket statements that everything that ChatGPT produces is fully compliant.
If you teach in Australia, this is huge. SlideHero aligns lessons with the Australian Curriculum, so you can confidently say, “This meets the Achievement Standards.”
slidehero
Thanks for your feedback
balamatom
[flagged]
slidehero
>what is, in your view, the purpose of your job?
To teach! Creating PowerPoints isn't what makes me a teacher. SlideHero's purpose is to free a teacher from the drudgery so they can focus on what matters, and 99% of that is the face-to-face interactions with kids.
>More than setting an example that research is unnecessary
Gpt is just a tool my friend, just like any other. In this scenario the teacher is the credentialed expert in the room using Gpt as a junior assistant for the purpose of making some slides. Of course the expert reviews the content and chooses the suitable content, that's why they're the expert :)
InsideOutSanta
Yeah. I feel weird about this. If used wisely, I can see how a tool like this will help good teachers produce better lessons faster. But if I think back to some of my teachers, I know that they'll put in a phrase, click a bunch of times, and then present whatever comes out as-is to children.
Although I guess whatever the LLM comes up with will not be much worse than what they would have come up with on their own.
rrr_oh_man
Agree with all points. It does not help with anything beyond the most rudimentary understanding of a topic (and the compulsory "Women in <Topic>: Breaking Gender Norms"). It does not seem to add any substance.
I very much respect this as a tech demo, as it obviously has sooo many moving parts and was hard to build.
But from an educational perspective: nah.
Maybe if you add in depth lecture notes, source material, etc.?
slidehero
Appreciate the feedback. I built it for k-12 educators and I've used it extensively in my own classroom. I can assure you that the tool is very useful and kids love the interactives a lot.
>most rudimentary understanding of a topic
This is exactly what a year 4 student needs!
It's easy to dismiss the content as obvious, but remember that a 9 year old is learning it for the first time!
> in depth lecture notes, source material, etc.?
Hehe I'm not sure a year 6 student is ready for all that :)
rrr_oh_man
Appreciate the follow-up.
> in depth lecture notes, source material, etc.?
> Hehe I don't think Timmy in year 6 history is ready for all that :)
That's exactly what we did where I grew up... Starting from grade 5.
In history class: Analysing contradictory sources and observing how history gets made. In physics: Doing our own experiments and deriving formulas from that. In politics: Debating and negotiating resolutions, UN-style. In Latin: reading (simple excerpts) from De Bello Gallico.
<insert rant about US school system>
james-bcn
I agree. I had some really wonderful biology teachers that inspired me to go on to do a degree in biology. They would have hated the example presentation about the Amazon rainforest.
This is very nicely designed, but as an educational tool? Ugh, it's awful. Sorry OP.
slidehero
Thankfully the teacher is in full control and can(and absolutely should) modify the content and sequencing to make the content shine.
AI is a force multiplier, it won't make a bad teacher a good teacher but it will make a good teacher even better!
It's the same with ai for coding. Will it make anybody a perfect dev? No, but in the right hands it absolutely does a phenomenal job at its strengths which great devs know how to leverage to help them focus on the bits that matter.
>Ugh, it's awful. Sorry OP.
All good, I'm a high school teacher, I have a thick skin :)
ujkiolp
>AI is a force multiplier, it won't make a bad teacher a good teacher but it will make a good teacher even better
but will it make a bad teacher an even worse teacher? Or let’s just not think about it?
pbhjpbhj
>I pick "true" and get...
This is almost exactly like a training experience I've had at work where it wasn't AI generated!
Weirdly, like how social media content games engagement, the wrong bits can help retention (for me).
hnpolicestate
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"
balamatom
>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."
Not simply wrong, nonsensical.
pratikshelar871
To be fair this is version 1 of the tool. Any tool will have issues in the first version but does not mean it cannot shape up to be a useful tool. Teachers will need education on when to use AI and when not to use AI. It will take time but it will eventually improve the process of teaching and help our teachers feel less overwhelmed so they can actually focus on the students.
cube00
It's a ChatGPT wrapper, it is not version 1.
julienmarie
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
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.
JetSetIlly
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
>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
> 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.
_puk
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
>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
> 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
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.
_puk
I've shared this with friends that are teaching, and they're definitely going to try it.
It was but 4 weeks ago that I had a very animated conversation with a teacher friend who wanted me to help them simply "just make AI do it" when they were doing lesson plans at short notice.
It's not just naive either, a few of them have gotten Google code to a point (with GPT direction) whereby they are able to make a presentation, but it's not quite fit for purpose, and as we know the last 10% is 90% of the work.. so it never quite sees the light of day.
slidehero
>I've shared this with friends that are teaching, and they're definitely going to try it.
That is so awesome and I'm really happy to hear it - thank you!
>as we know the last 10% is 90% of the work
yes, so true :)
pbhjpbhj
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
yes! a marketplace is on my very near roadmap :)
tda
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
>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
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!
slidehero
>Perhaps if all the prompts were translated to a language of choice
Yes you're probably right.
>But maybe you never even considered making a multi-lingual tool
I think there is a way to produce output that is in the desired language, but I honestly haven't looked too deeply into it. For now I am going to stay focused on English though.
>How do you combine a (full time?) teaching job with building such a tool? It feels way more than some hobby project
With many late nights and coffee, lots of coffee :)
>Congrats on the release!
Thank you I appreciate the kind words.
gus_massa
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
>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
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
I appreciate that. It's hard to find the perfect balance.
zelon88
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
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.
DanHulton
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
>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.
whatnow37373
> the magic happens in person, when the teacher presents
Yeah, I see that repeated often - usually by teachers - but that is definitely not my experience. Magic happens when I read and do the exercises. Teachers are a distraction unless they are of an exceptional level (think 3Blue1Brown).
Modern online education made this very clear for me. Sure, many online courses have teachers "presenting" and it is indeed nice to have a Nobel-prize-winning world-famous professor explain things to you in a novel way. No doubt about it. But 99,9999% of teachers I encounter in the real world are not anywhere near that level and I'm better off reading and doing exercising and, maybe, occasionally asking a question but I don't care for the "performance art" part of it one bit. I am literally doing my master this way and it completely beats anything I did in "real school" which consisted of distraction stacked on distraction on yet more distraction.
Your mileage, of course, will vary depending on your level of neural divergence and topic of study. Liberal arts like philosophy lean (slightly) heavier on interaction than, say, CS, but even in those cases your time is best spent reading a metric shit ton of books and processing them through introspective thought and exercises then watching performance art.
For the life of me I cannot phantom why teachers keep recreating the same stuff over and over again. Networking courses have been done thousands of time. Just settle on a nice basic course presented by a world-famous type and let the students do their thing without performance art/justifying your job.
Nothing comes close to just doing exercises and reading. I know I'm harping on the same topic here but teachers keep insisting we go to "classes" - sitting with 30+ noisy monkeys next to me - to watch them do their performance art and it is has become a major trigger for me for various reasons. A regular class with such a performance artist reminds me of people superficially interacting with an LLM and thinking they now master a topic. It's fun to watch and the teacher might mean well, but after an hour or so of this nothing has been gained and could be better spent studying and doing exercises. Have I mentioned exercises are important?
I know this is unpopular and I know I might be wired strangely compared to you. Also: I do not intend to come across as mean. All the teachers I met were very nice people and they do mean well. I'm just being straight.
sarmasamosarma
[dead]
fanssex
Good job! Reminds me of 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
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/
You can jump in and have a play with the tool all you like ;)
Cheers, Eli