UPDATE 4/19/2023: I’ve written about a few other AI tools specifically designed for teachers such as Conker and Would You Rather Generator. I’ve also written about how I’ve used Chat GPT for differentiation ideas. To find these articles and a plethora of links to sites that will help you teach your students about Artificial Intelligence, you can visit my Wakelet collection here.
While I’m talking about AI tools such as ChatGPT for teachers, let’s take a look at Curipod, a freemium web-based tool for creating interactive lesson presentations. The free version allows you to create 5 free presentations, but from my limited practice using it, you can delete previous presentations. You can’t export them, at this time, though. So unless you screen record them they will be lost forever after 30 days in your trash folder. Here is the pricing (Curipods are presentations):
Curipod is similar to Peardeck and Nearpod in that it allows your students to follow along on their own devices and interact by drawing, or answering polls and open-ended questions. One different interaction takes student responses and creates a Word Cloud based on them. What really sets Curipod apart from other presentations tools so far, though, is that you can input your lesson focus and learning objectives and let it create the interactive slide show for you.
It is definitely not perfect, of course. The idea shows promise, though. I tried an atypical prompt not based on any core curriculum standards to see how a presentation about S.C.A.M.P.E.R. would look. For the learning standards I typed in, “learn what the different letters in S.C.A.M.P.E.R. stand for see examples of applying each word of S.C.A.M.P.E.R. to innovation of the phone ask students to practice using S.C.A.M.P.E.R. to create a new pencil.”
The result was a presentation that began with a Word Cloud question:
You’re seeing it in editing mode above. All I did was put in the cartoonish picture of the pencil. After that slide, there were some informational slides about my learning objectives, the acronym of S.C.A.M.P.E.R. that weren’t quite complete, the “Concepts” below, and a slide giving “Fun Facts” about the pencil.
There were then a couple of repetitive open ended question slides similar to this:
and then several polling slides asking for their understanding of the acronym.
As the editor, you can change the headings, titles, and some media as well as add your own slides and import Powerpoints or PDF’s.
These are actually quite a lot of features for a free product that generates an interactive slide show on your topic in seconds. Although there aren’t a bunch of templates to choose from or some of the other bells and whistles you will find in other products, this could be a a great launching point for anyone who is creating a lesson from “scratch,” and save you quite a bit of time. Give Curipod a whirl and see what you come up with! Or, discover something in the gallery to save even more time!
