Sunday evening, the week after Diwali, and Meera (a composite) has the dining table to herself in a flat in Lucknow’s Gomti Nagar. Class 11, commerce stream, half-yearly exams finished ten days ago. Her economics teacher has set a ten-mark project with a classroom presentation in the second week of November, and Meera’s topic, chosen because her mother had frequently discussed it in July, is the price of vegetables. On her left is the NCERT chapter on inflation. On her right, a page of her mother’s grocery figures: tomatoes ₹80 a kilo in July and ₹30 this week, onions ₹45 down to ₹28. In the middle of the laptop screen, a PowerPoint window that says “Click to add title”.
It has remained unchanged for forty minutes.
She knows the material. When asked why tomatoes went up, she can explain the August rain, the trucks, the commission agent at the mandi, and the fact that a tomato rots in four days without cold storage, in that order, without pausing, and with additional observations about the onion trader on the corner. What she does not know is what goes on slide one, how many slides there should be, or how a collection of facts turns into a presentation with a beginning, a middle and an end. That gap, between knowing a topic and knowing its structure, is what keeps the window blank, and it is the one the AI slide tools may help address, provided the student completes the part the tool cannot.
The structure of a presentation
A structured presentation is a fixed set of components, and each slide serves a purpose. The structure commonly suggested to students, for anything from a Class 9 science exhibition entry to a final-year seminar, runs like this:
{{/usCountry}}A structured presentation is a fixed set of components, and each slide serves a purpose. The structure commonly suggested to students, for anything from a Class 9 science exhibition entry to a final-year seminar, runs like this:
{{/usCountry}}1. Title slide. Topic, name, class, section, date. Basic information.
2. The claim. One sentence the whole presentation exists to support. Meera’s: “Vegetable prices in Lucknow rose and fell this year because of supply, not because anyone suddenly wanted more tomatoes.”
3. Context. What the audience needs before the argument starts. Here, what inflation measures and why food carries so much weight in India’s consumer price index.
4. Three to five body slides, one point each. Monsoon damage to the crop. Losses between the farm and the mandi. Trader margins where there is no cold storage. Who is affected most?
5. Evidence. The slide with the numbers, her mother’s price diary turned into a chart.
6. Conclusion. The claim again, now supported by evidence.
7. A question slide. Something the class can discuss for two minutes: “Should the government cap vegetable prices?”
Nine slides for a seven-minute slot. The same format holds for a second-year BA English student at a government college in Gorakhpur presenting a seminar on a Mulk Raj Anand novel: title, claim (“the single-day structure of the novel is doing the political work”), context, three body slides on three scenes, quoted lines as evidence, conclusion, question. The economics teacher assumes the students have this structure already, which is how a student reaches Class 11 with considerable subject knowledge and never having been told what slide two is for.
Where the first draft comes from
Meera’s approach, one that some students may follow, starts from the notes rather than the chapter. She typed her mother’s figures and her four reasons into Quillbot's AI presentation maker as a preliminary prompt, set the slide-count selector to nine, and used Attach Files to add a photo of the handwritten price diary (it accepts PDF, Word, PowerPoint and image files, which can be relevant when the source material is a page from a notebook). The tool generated nine slide titles with speaker-ready text under each: full sentences she could read aloud rather than bullet fragments.Then it offered layouts and themes. She selected a basic one with a dark heading band, because the school projector makes pastel colours difficult to see. The editing stage is where the deck was modified. She renamed two section titles, deleted a slide the tool had added on “global food inflation trends” that was unrelated to Lucknow, moved the evidence slide to just before the conclusion, and cropped the diary photo so only the October column showed.
The prompt, and what came back
The prompt is where the structure gets decided, so it may require five minutes. Meera’s first attempt, “make a presentation on inflation in vegetable prices”, returned nine slides of general information with a generic picture of a supermarket trolley, which is not commonly used in Gomti Nagar for purchasing tomatoes. Her second:
Make a 9-slide presentation for a Class 11 economics project. Audience: my classmates and my economics teacher. Topic: why vegetable prices in Lucknow rose sharply in July and August 2026 and fell by late October, and what this shows about inflation. Use these notes: tomatoes ₹80 a kilo in July, ₹30 now; onions ₹45 then ₹28; our household spent about ₹900 extra on vegetables in July. Causes to cover, one slide each: monsoon damage to crops, losses between farm and mandi, trader margins and the lack of cold storage. Also include one slide on what inflation means and why food matters so much in the consumer price index, one slide with a chart of the prices, a conclusion, and a last slide with a discussion question for the class. Simple English, formal but not stiff.
Audience, slide count, actual figures, body points one per slide, the slide types she requires: that is the structure from the previous section written out as instructions.
Slide four shows what the tool does with unstructured notes. What she pasted:
tomato 80 rs july now 30. onion 45 then 28. mummy says veg bill went up by abt 900 in july. reasons: rain spoiled crop in the supplying states?? trucks, mandi, middlemen take margin. no cold storage for tomato so sellers panic. CPI food weight is high so headline inflation goes up. govt sold cheap tomatoes from vans in 2023? check
What came back, after she removed one sentence and changed “retail outlet” to “the cart outside our colony gate”:
Slide 4: The price travelled further than the tomato did
A tomato passes through at least three sets of hands between the farm and the cart outside our colony gate: the farmer, the mandi trader, the retailer. Each adds a margin. Heavy rain in August damaged the crop in the main supplying states, so less reached the mandi to begin with. Tomatoes spoil within days without cold storage. When supply is short, sellers raise prices rather than hold stock they cannot keep. In our house, the vegetable bill rose by about ₹900 in July.
The line about government tomato vans was excluded, because she never found a source for it.
What goes on the slide, and what gets said
The speaker-ready text provides a student with a sentence to say for every slide, and reading those sentences off the screen, word for word, is a habit teachers may notice within thirty seconds. The slide should carry less information than the spoken explanation does. Meera’s division, for four of her ideas:
| The idea in Meera’s notes | What the slide says | What she says aloud |
|---|---|---|
| Tomatoes got expensive and then cheap again | One chart: ₹80 in July, ₹30 in October, onions as a second line | “Look at the July peak. That was the fortnight the rain hit the crop, and the few trucks that arrived sold at whatever the mandi would bear.” |
| Middlemen eat the difference | Farm, mandi, retailer: three margins on one tomato | Thirty seconds on what a commission agent does, because half the class has never been inside a mandi |
| Inflation is a number on the nine o’clock news | Food carries a heavy weight in India’s consumer price index | “This is why a tomato spike moves the headline number even when the price of a school shoe has not changed.” |
| It hurts some families more than others | The poorer the household, the larger the share of income that goes on food | Her grandmother’s story about the family that runs the tea stall downstairs buying half a kilo where they used to buy one |
The slide presents the fact; the spoken presentation provides the explanation and the story.
Does it do the thinking?
The chapter still has to be read. The tool’s context slide on the consumer price index was generally accurate and lacked specific context, because it did not know which examples the NCERT chapter uses, or that the class had spent two periods on demand-pull versus cost-push inflation and would want to see those terms. Meera rewrote that slide from the book, which took longer than generating the entire presentation.
Then the follow-up question. Her teacher’s, in class, was “Why did onions come down more slowly than tomatoes?” It was on no slide, and no slide tool answers it. Meera did, because onions can be stored for months and traders release them slowly, and because her mother had explained that in August.
Some additional limitations
- There is no speaker notes field, so the speaker-ready text has to be copied into a notebook or added in PowerPoint after export.
- No animations or slide transitions. These can be added in PowerPoint afterwards if the teacher requires them.
- The tool is labelled Beta on its page and may produce occasional inaccuracies: a generated image of “a vegetable market” that did not resemble a market in Uttar Pradesh.
- Every figure it writes is a figure to check; it states a number from the student's notes and a different number with the same confidence.
The school’s computer runs PowerPoint 2016
The desktop beside the smart board in Meera’s classroom runs an older version of PowerPoint, a locked browser and nothing else, so the presentation, as it is commonly referred to at school, has to leave the browser as a file. Quillbot's PPT maker page is an option when a PowerPoint file is required at the end: the same generator, designed for PPTX output, with an outline step for adjusting topics and their order before the slides are built. The PPTX can be exported and opened in the version of PowerPoint available on the home desktop, where the chart and fonts can be checked, and transitions can be added there. A PDF can also be exported for the pen drive, and both files can be sent to the student's own WhatsApp account as well. Google Slides users can export the PPTX and upload it; direct export is marked as coming soon.
School rules on AI
Schools differ. Some CBSE and state board schools now ask for a line in the project file declaring which tools were used; some prohibit generation for assessed work; others have not specified a policy and leave it to the subject teacher. Students should check the applicable rules beforehand. If the rubric says the project is assessed on “understanding and presentation skills”, a deck generated from a student's own notes and explained in the student's own words may be permitted under certain policies, and the teacher’s interpretation of the policy is what counts. The notes and prompt can be retained; they are evidence that the original work was the student's own. The Citation Generator can be used for preparing the bibliography page some schools still require to be handwritten, which is a separate task.
For parents: a five-minute check
A parent who is unfamiliar with the difference between a CPI and a CGPA can still check whether the child understood the project. The parent can close the laptop first. Then the parent can ask the child to explain one body slide, selected at random, without referring to any material. The parent can also ask where one number came from. Another question is what happens to the argument if that number is wrong. The parent can then ask which slide the child would cut if the teacher gave them three minutes instead of seven, because a child who understands the topic may respond quickly, while a child who received AI-generated slides may hesitate, since every slide may appear equally important when the student has not developed the content independently.
For a younger child’s science exhibition entry (the sand-and-charcoal water filter is a common example), the same test works with one question: “Why does the charcoal come after the sand?”
Questions people ask
Is Quillbot's presentation tool free? Yes. A Premium plan adds unlimited presentations, faster generation and access to all of Quillbot's other tools. The presentation maker is labelled Beta on its page.
Can I upload the textbook chapter instead of typing notes? Attach Files takes PDF, Word, PowerPoint, and image files, so this is possible. A deck built from the chapter alone may become a chapter summary; the slides that contribute to the assessment come from the student's own notes.
How many slides for a seven-minute class presentation? Eight to ten. Roughly a minute per body slide, plus the title and the question slide, which require relatively little time.
Will the teacher know I used AI? This may be apparent, sometimes from the generic sentences rather than from any detector. Students should revise every line that does not reflect their usual way of speaking.
Before starting the presentation
Students can take a sheet of rough paper. They can write the one-line claim at the top, in their own words: the sentence they would say if the teacher stopped them at the classroom door and gave them ten seconds. Under it, three points, one line each. Under those, the two numbers they consider most reliable. Only then should they open the tool and paste that sheet in as the prompt.
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