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.
You can jump in and have a play with the tool all you like ;)
Cheers, Eli
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!
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!
:)
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Dead Comment
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.
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.?
>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 :)
This is very nicely designed, but as an educational tool? Ugh, it's awful. Sorry OP.
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 :)
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).
Not simply wrong, nonsensical.
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!
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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
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.
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!