slidehero

yes! a marketplace is on my very near roadmap :)

>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.

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 :)

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 :)

Of course. Every year there is usually a new area of focus for many subjects. This means building up a new library of content for that year's focus. Each year teachers will have a new cohort of students and what worked last year may not work this year. For example, there may be more students with specific learning needs who require content to be simpler, or on the flipside you may have a year of high flyers who need to be extended.

>I could assume once every few years a teacher somewhere has a breakthrough on how to teach something better

Education is it's own beast. It turns out that as a teacher you are constantly, every week learning and developing new and better ways of explaining content. Teaching is as much art as it is science. There is no settled "best way" to teach since we all learn at different pace and in different ways.

Teaching is also not only content. It's pacing and sequencing. As a teacher you're constantly learning what works and what doesn't just by applying your craft.

And finally schools move teachers around constantly. Last year you were teaching Year 8 History and this year you've been moved to Year 7 Social Studies. That requires a huge amount of effort to build up your own bank of activities, slideshows, links, videos etc.

It's a never ending task.

haha I never thought of that :)

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.

>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.

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.

>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.

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.

>It looks like teachers are actually creating presentations in minutes

That's wonderful! I assume the presentation did not require more than 5mins to review, maybe it was only 2 slides :)

Thanks for your feedback

>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 :)

haha, who knows what the future holds? :)

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.

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"

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.

Thank you!

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.

>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.

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.

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

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.

I appreciate that. It's hard to find the perfect balance.

>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.

thank you for the tip, this looks like an awesome library! :)

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.

> If the user is typing in a form field while an update to the app state comes

Could you give a practical example of what you mean here? I can't quite wrap my head around what kind of interaction you're describing.

Do you mean some kind of scenario like a shared document with multiple people editing it? This is a very niche case.

> This means when the DOM resets, there's no problem with elements getting removed and added back in,

Could you give a practical example of this? I've been building web apps for a long time and I don't know what "when the dom resets" means.

>People don't memorize things any more

....

and it made no difference.