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

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!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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