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.
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?
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
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.
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 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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 .
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
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.
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.
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
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?
Nominative determinism at play? You call yourself Eli like in ELI5 (explain like I'm 5 years old).
potential to be the bingocardcreator.com for teachers, if you market this right. nice job!
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
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?
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.
Pretty cool! Would it work for primary school teachers?
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?
Hey, pretty cool! Good going for building all that out yourself, have you worked in Web-tech or anything before?
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!
A few pivots/features away and you'll have created a more hands on deepresearch.
awesome & helpful tool
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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!