Slides, and the projector you sometimes have

What the slide generators are for

Several tools now turn a prompt into a finished slide deck: Gamma, Canva’s AI presentation feature, Microsoft Copilot in PowerPoint, Gemini in Google Slides. They are impressive for thirty seconds. Then you read the slides.

They are built for business pitches, where a slide is a backdrop for a speaker. The default is a heading, an image, a line of text. For a class of forty, half of whom are copying from the board, that is close to useless. And the check question describes the second failure: the day the projector does not work, and the deck cannot be printed as anything a student could learn from.

Generate the substance, not the slides

Reverse the order. Have the model produce the thing that matters, the structure and the words, and let the slide tool do the layout.

Outline a 40-minute lesson on the causes of the 1857 uprising for Class 8, as 10 slides.
For each slide give: a title of at most 6 words, three bullet points of at most 12 words each, and 80 to 120 words of speaker notes in plain prose that say what I will explain while this slide is up.
Slide 1 is a question students can answer from last lesson. Slide 10 is one question that checks whether the lesson landed.
Plain text, no markdown.

Now you have a script. The speaker notes are the lesson; the bullets are the prompts. Paste the outline into Google Slides, LibreOffice Impress or PowerPoint (ten slides takes ten minutes) and put the speaker notes in the notes field, which is where they belong.

When the projector fails, print the notes pages. Every slide’s bullets and its notes, on paper, is a handout that stands on its own. That is the whole reason to build it this way.

Free layouts

Google Slides is free with a Google account and has templates that are adequate. LibreOffice Impress is free, runs offline on any laptop, and opens and saves PowerPoint files. Canva’s free tier has better templates than either and exports to PowerPoint. None of these need the AI features to be useful; the AI produced the outline, and a template supplies the look.

If your school gives you Gemini in Slides or Copilot in PowerPoint, they can generate slides from your outline inside the tool, and the result is better than the generic generators because you supplied the substance. Check that they did not shorten your bullets to look tidy.

What goes on a slide for a class

A few rules the generators do not know, and you do:

• A slide students copy from needs the words, not a picture. If they will write it down, it goes on the slide in full. If they will not, it goes in your notes.
• One idea per slide, and the idea in the title. “Causes: economic” is a label. “Land tax rose 40% in ten years” is an idea.
• Fewer slides, more time on each. Ten slides for forty minutes. Twenty-five for forty minutes is a lecture nobody follows.
• The last slide is the check. One question. Answers on paper, collected. The generator will end on “Thank you” or “Any questions?”, which is a slide with no purpose.

Images on slides

The previous lesson applies: real photographs from Wikimedia Commons for real things, generated illustrations for scenes, and no generated diagrams. A slide with a wrong diagram is a wrong diagram at two metres wide.

Slides for a phone

Some teachers project from a phone, or hand a phone round a group. Slides built for a large screen are unreadable at 15 centimetres. If the phone is your projector, use a larger font, four lines maximum, and treat the deck as a set of flashcards. The outline prompt above works with “for viewing on a phone screen” added.

The honest limit

A slide deck, however well built, is a lesson delivered from the front, and the model’s outlines lean that way: explanation, then example, then a question. The parts of a lesson where students do something are the parts the outline under-produces, because they are not slides. Add them yourself, as a blank slide that says “Do question 4 now”, so the deck’s timing carries the activity and you are not tempted to talk through the gap.