(MENAFN- AsiaNet News) A science teacher I know at a CBSE school on the edge of Kochi sent me a photo of her timetable last Sunday night, mostly as a complaint. Five sections across two subjects: science for 8A, 8B and 8C, maths for 7A and 7B, 31 periods a week before substitutions. Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons are gone to invigilation duty for the Class 10 half-yearly exams, which in her school means standing at the back of a hall for three hours, collecting answer scripts in bundles of twenty, tying them with string, and carrying them to the examination room before she can even think about the next day's lessons. And photosynthesis, the chapter 8B has to finish before the unit test, must be taught by Thursday.
Thursday does not move, so the preparation shrinks: she teaches from the board, or reuses a 2023 deck built for a different edition, with slide 7 still pointing to a page number that no longer exists.
Her question was whether the AI slide tools her students keep mentioning are any use to a teacher, so we spent an evening on it with her chapter PDF and the free version of Quillbot's tool.
The job of a classroom deck
A deck in a classroom does three jobs, and none of them is“explain the topic”.
The first is pacing. Forty minutes, minus attendance and the previous teacher running over, is about thirty minutes of teaching. Ten slides give that half hour a skeleton: if she is on slide four at the ten-minute mark she is on schedule, if she is on slide eight she has rushed.
The second is attention. Thirty-eight thirteen-year-olds after lunch will drift, and a screen that changes every three minutes gives the drifting ones somewhere to come back to.
The third is giving the class something to copy or argue about. The notebook still matters in most Indian schools, so the word equation in large type means forty notebooks get the same equation. A slide with nothing on it but“Would a plant kept in a dark cupboard for a week still be alive?” gives a class four minutes of disagreement.
What the deck must not do is replace the explanation. A slide carrying the full textbook paragraph gets read, aloud by the teacher and silently by the class, and the class reads faster, so they switch off while she is still halfway down. The slide holds the frame; the teacher supplies the meaning, the example from the school garden, the pause when a child looks lost. An ai presentation maker will draft the frame from a chapter PDF in a few minutes, and the time that buys is for the meaning, not for a prettier frame.
Thursday's deck, start to finish
Quillbot's AI Presentation Maker is still labelled Beta, and the free version is what she used. Premium adds unlimited presentations, faster generation and access to the rest of Quillbot's tools; for one or two decks a week, free is where to start.
Attach the chapter, then write a prompt that reads like a lesson plan
The tool takes a typed prompt, pasted notes, or files through an Attach Files option that accepts PDF, Word (.docx), PowerPoint (.pptx) and images (PNG, JPG, JPEG, WebP). She attached the chapter PDF and her of notes from last year, which had the examples she likes (the hibiscus by the gate, the potato experiment that failed in 2024).
The prompt matters more than the files.“Photosynthesis class 8” returns a general deck written for nobody in particular. A prompt that names the class level, the learning outcomes and the slide count, with the slide-count selector set to match, returns something close to a lesson:
Make a 12-slide lesson presentation for Class 8 science on photosynthesis. Audience: 13-year-olds whose second language is English. Use the attached chapter PDF and notes as the source; do not add facts that are not in them. Learning outcomes: students should be able to name the raw materials and products of photosynthesis, write the word equation, explain what chlorophyll and sunlight do, and describe the starch test on a leaf. Keep each slide under 35 words. Put the word equation on a slide by itself. Leave space on one slide for a labelled diagram of a leaf cross-section. End with three recap questions. No stock photos of light bulbs or sunrises.
A lecturer teaching price elasticity to first-year BA Economics students would change the level and the outcomes (compute elasticity from two price and quantity pairs; explain why a bus fare rise and a cinema ticket rise behave differently) and set 16 slides for a 50-minute lecture.
Generation returns slide titles and text written to be spoken from, then a choice of AI-generated layouts, themes and design options. Pick the plainest, highest-contrast theme: projectors in government schools are often old, curtains rarely close, and pale text on a patterned background is invisible from the fourth bench.
Editing is where the lesson gets in
The editor lets you change titles and content, reorder, delete or add sections, and crop images, remove their backgrounds or apply filters. Her edit took about twenty minutes:
Delete the“Introduction” and“Agenda” slides. A class does not need an agenda; it needs the first question. Move the word equation to after the experiment. On slide 3 it is a fact to memorise. After the starch test it is a conclusion the class has earned. Add a“pause and ask” slide every three or four slides. One question, large type, nothing else:“Where does the water come from?” The deck stops there and the teaching happens, and no tool puts those in for you. Swap the generic images for a labelled, textbook-style diagram. The tool can suggest or generate images, charts and graphs to match the topic, fine for a bar chart of oxygen bubbles per minute from a pondweed experiment, wrong for the leaf cross-section, because the children will be examined on the textbook figure with the textbook labels, and a generated drawing with the palisade cells in the wrong place teaches the wrong picture. She photographed the figure from the book, cropped it (in the editor, or in PowerPoint after export) and added a credit line. Cut the slide count. Twelve became ten. Fewer slides, more time per slide, more talking by students.
Export, share, and the three things it will not do
Export covers JPG, PNG, GIF, PDF (standard or print) and PPTX. She exported PPTX for the staff-room laptop, which runs PowerPoint and nothing newer, and a print PDF for handouts.
Sharing is by email invite or a shared link, with real-time collaboration, so the colleague who teaches 8A and 8C got the link and changed two examples for her sections without anyone emailing files around.
Three things the tool does not do: automatic animations, slide transitions, and speaker notes. For a classroom, two of those are no loss. Transitions distract, and the one animation a teacher wants, revealing the right-hand side of the word equation after the class has guessed it, takes thirty seconds in PowerPoint. Speaker notes are the one you will miss. Write them yourself in PowerPoint's notes pane, because notes in your own words are the only ones you can deliver without reading.
How many slides does a 40-minute period need?
Fewer than the default, usually. The selector is there to be set low. A rough guide from a few teachers' decks:
| Lesson type | Slides | What the AI drafts | What the teacher adds |
| New chapter, one period (Class 8 science) | 10 to 12 | Outline, headings, short text from the PDF | Question slides, the textbook diagram, the explanation itself |
| Practical or activity period | 6 to 8 | Aim, materials, steps, a safety line | Timing per step, what to observe |
| College lecture, 50 minutes (price elasticity) | 14 to 16 | Definitions, formula slide, a draft chart, one worked example | Checked numbers, a local market example, a question to argue over |
| Revision before a unit test | 8 to 10 | Key terms, one-line recaps, quiz questions | Mark allocation, last year's common errors |
| Parent-teacher meeting | 5 to 6 | Agenda, class overview, headings | Real class data, no student names on screen, the tone |
The AI drafts what comes from the textbook; the teacher adds what comes from the room.
One paragraph in, four lines out
One paragraph convinced her. The textbook (and the first draft, which copied its register) had this:
Green plants synthesise their own food by the process of photosynthesis, in which carbon dioxide absorbed from the atmosphere through the stomata and water absorbed from the soil by the roots are converted, in the presence of sunlight and the green pigment chlorophyll present in the chloroplasts of the leaf cells, into carbohydrates such as glucose, with oxygen released as a by-product. Photosynthesis is therefore the ultimate source of food for all living organisms.
Nobody copies that. Nobody reads it from the fourth bench either. After the 35-word limit and her own edit:
What a leaf needs, and what it makes
In: carbon dioxide (air), water (roots), sunlight Chlorophyll in the leaf traps the light Out: glucose for the plant, oxygen for us Word equation on the next slide, once you have guessed it
The fourth line is a promise to the class and a cue to herself. The“ultimate source of food” line went into her notes, to say rather than show.
The revision deck and the parent-teacher meeting come from the same place
Three weeks later the same upload makes the revision deck with a different prompt: eight slides, key terms only, five quiz questions with each answer on the following slide, no diagrams except the one they will be asked to label. Question slide up, the class writes, answer slide up, the class marks its own work.
Parent-teacher meeting slides are a different animal and a shorter job: what the class covered this term, what the unit test showed in general terms, what comes before the final exam, and how parents can help at home (a plant on the windowsill with one leaf wrapped in foil is a better ask than“make them study”). Paste that outline as text, set the selector to six, let the same tool, Quillbot's ppt maker, lay it out, and export a print PDF so parents without a phone leave with a sheet. Individual marks never go on a slide.
Where it falls short
Diagram-heavy subjects. Biology, geography, most of physics and all of geometry live on labelled figures. Generated illustrations are pleasant and wrong in small ways: a label on the wrong layer, an angle marked where no angle is. Use the textbook figure or a photo of your own board drawing, and treat the tool's images as placeholders.
Regional-language text. Many classrooms run in Malayalam, Hindi, Tamil, Marathi or Kannada medium, and many more outside India in languages other than English. A tool accepting a prompt in a language is not the same as producing slides in that script with technical terms spelt the way the state textbook spells them. Generate the structure in English and type the slide text yourself in the script your students will be examined in. Half an hour extra per chapter, a term of confused notebooks saved.
Factual errors stated confidently. A prompt is an instruction, not a guarantee, and the draft can still bring in a figure from elsewhere or garble one from the chapter. Check every number, date, formula and equation against the book before export; a reversed word equation on slide 6 gets copied into forty notebooks and comes back in forty answer scripts.
Students without devices. Telling the class to“go through the slides at home” assumes every child has a phone with data, and in a government school, or plenty of private ones, a good share do not, or share one phone with three siblings. The deck belongs in the room, with a printed PDF for anyone who needs one, and homework should never require the tool. Asking students to build their own decks is fine as an option in the computer lab period and unfair as a take-home assignment.
Questions teachers ask
Does it write speaker notes? No. It drafts slide text that can be spoken from, but speaker notes are not included, so export PPTX and write your own in PowerPoint.
My chapter is a scanned PDF. Will that work? Attach Files accepts PDF and image files. If the scan is faint or skewed, paste the chapter's section headings into the prompt as well, and check the draft against the book with extra care.
Can my students open it without PowerPoint? Export a PDF, or share the link. For Google Classroom, export PPTX and upload it to Google Slides; native export there is not available yet (the page says it is coming).
Is the free version enough for a term? Start there. Premium adds unlimited presentations, faster generation and access to all of Quillbot's other tools; decide after a month whether you have hit a limit.
Tonight, one chapter
Take the chapter you teach on Thursday. Attach the PDF, write a prompt with the class level, three learning outcomes and a slide count of ten, generate, then spend twenty minutes deleting, reordering and adding two question slides. Export PPTX and write your notes. The deck will be rough, and the lesson, which was never going to come from a tool, will be yours.
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