>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.
> the magic happens in person, when the teacher presents
Yeah, I see that repeated often - usually by teachers - but that is definitely not my experience. Magic happens when I read and do the exercises. Teachers are a distraction unless they are of an exceptional level (think 3Blue1Brown).
Modern online education made this very clear for me. Sure, many online courses have teachers "presenting" and it is indeed nice to have a Nobel-prize-winning world-famous professor explain things to you in a novel way. No doubt about it. But 99,9999% of teachers I encounter in the real world are not anywhere near that level and I'm better off reading and doing exercising and, maybe, occasionally asking a question but I don't care for the "performance art" part of it one bit. I am literally doing my master this way and it completely beats anything I did in "real school" which consisted of distraction stacked on distraction on yet more distraction.
Your mileage, of course, will vary depending on your level of neural divergence and topic of study. Liberal arts like philosophy lean (slightly) heavier on interaction than, say, CS, but even in those cases your time is best spent reading a metric shit ton of books and processing them through introspective thought and exercises then watching performance art.
For the life of me I cannot phantom why teachers keep recreating the same stuff over and over again. Networking courses have been done thousands of time. Just settle on a nice basic course presented by a world-famous type and let the students do their thing without performance art/justifying your job.
Nothing comes close to just doing exercises and reading. I know I'm harping on the same topic here but teachers keep insisting we go to "classes" - sitting with 30+ noisy monkeys next to me - to watch them do their performance art and it is has become a major trigger for me for various reasons. A regular class with such a performance artist reminds me of people superficially interacting with an LLM and thinking they now master a topic. It's fun to watch and the teacher might mean well, but after an hour or so of this nothing has been gained and could be better spent studying and doing exercises. Have I mentioned exercises are important?
I know this is unpopular and I know I might be wired strangely compared to you. Also: I do not intend to come across as mean. All the teachers I met were very nice people and they do mean well. I'm just being straight.