If you are looking to add additional interactivity to your teacher presentations while also leveraging the power of AI, you may want to consider trying out Curipod.
An Overview
Curipod is a slideshow creation tool that allows you to quickly and easily add engaging student activities into your presentation. To use this with your classes, you first create an interactive presentation, and then once you’re ready to present, you have students join the experience on their own devices using either a QR code or a join code.
Once students have access, their screens follow along with the teacher presentation in front of the room. When you arrive at an activity slide, you click a button to begin the activity. This unlocks the student screen, and your students are then able to actively participate.
Students might be given an open-ended question, a poll, a word cloud, a drawing task, or an activity that provides AI-generated feedback. Once you end the presentation, you can review student progress via a built-in dashboard.
Key Features
Below, you’ll find a deeper dive into five key features of Curipod.
You have three main options for creating a lesson in Curipod. The first is to use the AI lesson generator. When you click the “Create Lesson” button, you get options for how you want to get started. You can choose a lesson category, like “Build Writing Skills” or “Prepare for Testing,” or you can choose “Generate Lesson” to have AI help you create a custom first draft of a lesson.
With each of these options, you get fields to fill out. This is essentially helping you write an effective AI prompt. You’ll be asked to enter a topic and a standard or learning objective, as well as a grade level, language, and any additional criteria that you’d like to be considered. Then, you simply click the “Get Lesson
“’ button.
For example, you might enter something like “figurative language, including simile, metaphor, and personification” for 11th-grade English-speaking students. After about a minute, you’ll be presented with a short slideshow lesson that includes a title slide, content slides, and integrated activity slides prompting students to actively participate in and practice the skills associated with figurative language.
Activities may include open-ended questions asking students to share what they already know about figurative language and prompts to write a metaphor and receive AI-generated feedback on their efforts. There may also be offline partner discussion questions as well as AI whiteboard and polling activities.
Even if you don’t want to use this exactly as is, it can give you a good starting point and save you the time and effort of creating a first draft. Since everything is editable, this can all be easily revised.
If you already have a slideshow that you like and simply want to add interactivity to it, the “Curify My Slides” option is a helpful resource. With this feature, you are prompted to either upload your presentation or select one from Google Drive.
As with the lesson creation, you still choose a grade level, language, and additional criteria before clicking the “Get Lesson” button. This option gives you a little more control over your design and content since you’re starting with something that you’ve already created.
Once your slideshow has been imported, Curipod will add activity slides at key locations in your presentation. If you like them, you can keep them. If you don’t, you can either delete them completely, revise them, or add new activities of your choosing. It’s completely customizable.
Overall, this option is nice for quickly getting engagement ideas for a presentation that you’ve already created.
If you like to have a greater degree of control, there’s also an option where you can start from scratch with a blank slideshow. With this option, you will be taken to a screen that looks a lot like a typical slideshow creation tool, like Google Slides or Microsoft PowerPoint. You can add slides and all the typical design and content elements that you’re used to having access to: text, images, video, backgrounds, and shapes.
You also have access to the activity tool, so you can insert your choice of engaging activities between your content slides. Activity options include open-ended questions, drawing activities, polls, word clouds, and AI feedback prompts, which provide students with AI-generated instant feedback on their ideas.
Rather than a full lesson, maybe you just want a quick activity to start your lesson or finish it off. That’s where this option comes in. With this tool, you get help creating vocabulary activities, bell ringers, brain breaks, and exit tickets.
When you select one of these options, you are taken to a page of sample activities. Simply select one that sounds on target for your needs. Then, either use as is or customize it.
Curipod is designed for teachers. Because of that, there is a plethora of built-in classroom management tools included. For instance, as soon as you create a slideshow, you automatically get the student access codes printed at the top of the slides. There’s no need to go through extra steps to find a way to provide students with access.
When you are sharing the slideshow with students, you control when they can interact on their devices. If the slides are strictly for information, student screens are locked, and a note appears on their devices directing them to look to the front of the room. When an activity appears, the teacher must click the “Start” button to unlock student screens, allowing them to provide an answer. There’s a convenient timer counting down to pace the activity, and you can end the task early, which automatically submits student work from where they’re currently at.
If you’re worried about students submitting inappropriate responses, there is a teacher moderation feature that allows you to review and approve student input before it is shown publicly with the whole class.
When the lesson is complete, teachers have access to a “My Reports” section, which provides details on student interaction during the presentation as well as AI summaries that indicate what the class understood best, what they need to work on, and which students might need extra help.
As with any AI-generated feedback, it’s important that you bring your teacher lens into the equation and make sure that you agree with the feedback. AI can save you lots of time and provide timely feedback, but it can also be wrong, so make sure that you’re always an active partner in any feedback or evaluation process.
Ways to Get Started
So how might you begin to use Curipod? Here are three ideas to consider:
- Add interactivity to existing teacher presentations. For those times when you need to directly present information, this can help keep students more engaged and prevent your lesson from becoming a passive learning event for students.
- Start and end lessons. The bell ringer and exit ticket options in Curipod are fast and convenient ways to engage students at the beginning and end of a class period. They can also give you valuable feedback that you can use to plan your next steps.
- Get new ideas. Whether you are teaching a lesson for the hundredth time or embarking on something new, you’ll naturally want novel ideas and insights. Curipod’s lesson generator can give you this jumping off point. Even if you don’t use the AI-generated suggestions as initially presented, they can still help spark your own creativity and idea generation.
AI is becoming infused into more programs and apps, including teacher planning and creation tools. Curipod is one of those options that you may want to leverage in support of your lesson planning efforts.
AVID Connections
This resource connects with the following components of the AVID College and Career Readiness Framework:
- Instruction
- Student Agency
- Insist on Rigor
- Break Down Barriers
Extend Your Learning
- 10 Ways Curipod Engages Your Students With AI (Matt Miller via Ditch That Textbook)
- AI Tools for Education: Curipod (University of Cincinnati Libraries)
- 5 Ways to Create Curiosity in the Classroom (Curipod)