Every tool in LessonPlanner One, explained

Getting started

LessonPlanner One is a free, browser-based tool for building BOPPPS lessons — Bridge-in, Objectives (Learning Outcomes), Pre-assessment, Participatory learning, Post-assessment, Summary — and turning them into slides, worksheets, handouts and PowerPoint decks. There is no account and no sign-in, and nothing you create is sent to a server.

Your first five minutes

1. Open the app. On first visit you'll see a data storage notice — read it and confirm. It explains that everything lives in your browser, so exporting is how you keep your work.
2. The template picker opens next. Choose a starting point (see Templates) or import an existing lesson JSON file.
3. You land in the Slides tab with your deck loaded. Fill in the lesson header — course topic, instructor name, email — at the top of the page.
4. Open the Insert panel on the right (]) and start adding blocks to the current slide.
5. When you're done, name your file in the toolbar and press Save to download a versioned JSON backup, then export to HTML, PDF or PowerPoint for delivery.

What you need

The workspace

The top navigation bar is always visible and never scrolls away. It holds four workspaces plus utility links.

The top navigation bar

How the three editors relate

They are separate tools that share content in one direction: Planner → AI Prompt → Slides. You can start anywhere, but that path is the intended flow.

Light and dark mode

Two switches do the same thing: the sun/moon pair in the top bar, and Light Mode / Dark Mode in the Slides toolbar's Settings (gear) menu. The setting is per browser and applies to the editor chrome — it does not change the colours of your slides or of anything you export.

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcuts are ignored while you're typing in a text field, so they never interrupt writing.

Editor shortcuts

Full-screen presentation

Slide Designer (16:9 canvas)

This help page

Press / or Ctrl/⌘ + K to focus the search box, ↑/↓ to move through results, Enter to open one, and Esc to clear.

Planner

The Planner is a single-page lesson-plan form: one field per BOPPPS stage, plus a participatory-learning activity table with durations and materials. It's the fastest way to think a lesson through before you worry about slides.

What you fill in

• Document name, week and version — used for the exported file name.
• Lesson topic.
• Bridge-in — how you connect with learners and introduce the topic.
• Learning outcomes — bullets or numbers; use measurable action verbs.
• Pre-assessment — how you check prior knowledge.
• Participatory learning — repeating rows of activity description, duration in minutes, and materials needed.
• Post-assessment — how you verify the outcomes were met.
• Summary — key points and what comes next.
• Reflection — what worked, what to change next time.

Getting content out

• Export the plan as a formatted, print-ready lesson-plan table.
• Paste a BOPPPS lesson-plan JSON in and click Apply to load it back into the form.
• Switch to the AI Prompt tab and click Load from Planner to carry everything across.

AI Prompt Generator

Fill in a structured form about your lesson and the generator produces two things: a detailed natural-language prompt you can paste into any AI assistant, and a JSON template that assistant can fill in and you can import straight back into the Slides editor.

The form

• Basic information — lesson topic, course, duration, target audience, prerequisite knowledge.
• BOPPPS sections — a rich-text field for each stage. Each stage has an include worksheet question checkbox that attaches a question prompt to that stage.
• Participatory learning — repeating activities with duration, instructor actions, student actions, and materials.
• Wrap-up — overall materials required, reflections on the lesson, and additional notes such as accommodations and special considerations.

Every long field is a full rich-text editor: bold, italic, underline, colour, highlight, alignment, bullet and numbered lists, links, tables, superscript and subscript, and code blocks.

Toolbar buttons

Slides editor & toolbar

The Slides tab is the main workspace. It has a collapsible lesson header at the top, a sticky toolbar under it, the slide canvas in the middle, the Sections outline drawer on the left, and the Insert tools panel on the right.

Lesson header

The header holds the course topic, instructor name and instructor email, plus the week and date for the session. Click the chevron button at the far left of the toolbar to collapse it and reclaim vertical space.

Toolbar reference (left to right)

The Settings (gear) menu

Accordion layout vs slide layout

Set Body Layout in the Settings tab (Layout & Slides). Accordion renders the lesson as expandable sections on one long page — good for a course-page handout. Slides renders one slide at a time with navigation, which is what the PowerPoint and PDF exports are built around.

Sections & the outline drawer

A lesson is made of sections; each section holds one or more slides; each slide holds content blocks. The seven default sections are Bridge-In, Learning Outcomes, Pre-Assessment, Participatory Learning, Post-Assessment, Summary & Next Steps, and Resources & Materials.

The outline drawer

Press [ or click Sections. It lists every section with its slides as small 16:9 thumbnails, so you can see the shape of the deck at a glance.

• Filter items — type to narrow the list to matching sections and slide names.
• Issues only — filters to slides that are empty, with a count badge. Use it as a pre-flight check before exporting.
• Expand all / Collapse all — open or close every section's slide list.
• Click any section or slide thumbnail to jump the canvas straight to it.

Managing sections

• Rename a section, or give it a separate student-friendly title that appears alongside the formal name in exports.
• Delete a section you don't need — Bridge-In through Resources are defaults, not requirements.
• Add a section divider (a section title card) before a section so the deck announces each new stage. Divider settings control its label and styling.
• Give each section its own slide header bar colour, or use one colour for the whole deck (Settings → Layout & Slides → Slide Header Color).

Managing slides

• Add slide — splits a long section across several slides.
• Name a slide — click the slide name area to give it a label that shows in the outline drawer and on the slide.
• Slide duration — record how many minutes a slide should take; useful for pacing a class.
• Include in export — a per-slide toggle in Slide Settings. Turn it off to keep a slide in the file but out of exports.
• Clear all blocks empties a slide; Remove this slide deletes it.
• Slide-break dividers inside a section force a page break at a specific point.

Insert panel & block catalogue

Press ] or click Tools. The panel shows an Edit/View badge so you always know whether you can currently add content, and it groups every tool into four categories.

Basic blocks

Callouts

Three one-click coloured boxes for emphasis: Info (blue), Exercise (green) and Warning (amber). Each is a rich text block with an icon and a coloured left border.

Preset layouts

Presets drop several blocks onto a slide at once so you don't have to build a layout by hand: 1-Col, 2-Col, 3-Col, Img+Txt, Grid (card grid) and Hero. Choosing a column preset opens a short dialog so you can set the columns up before they're inserted.

The Settings tab offers a longer list of PowerPoint-style layouts: Single Column, Two Columns, Three Columns, Image + Text, Card Grid, Hero Section, Title Slide, Title + Content, Title / Text / Image, Comparison, Picture + Caption, and Title / Text / Video.

Draw-overs

Rect, Circle, Tri, Star, Hex and Draw all open the Shape Builder — a drawing canvas whose output is inserted as an image block. See Shapes & draw-overs.

Adding blocks without the panel

In Edit mode each slide also has inline Add content buttons: one at the top of the slide and one below every existing block, so you can insert exactly where you want rather than always appending.

Working with each block

Every block shares the same basics: drag its handle to reorder, use its toolbar to edit or delete it, and double-click on the 16:9 canvas to edit content.

Text, headings and lists

Text blocks use a full rich-text editor. Available formatting: bold, italic, underline, text colour, highlight, font family, text alignment, bullet and numbered lists, links, tables with header rows, superscript and subscript, block quotes, horizontal rules, and inline code.

You can switch a text block to HTML mode to paste or clean up markup directly — useful after pasting from Word or a web page, where hidden spans and inline styles often come along for the ride.

Cards

Choose a layout — 2×1, 2×2, 3×1 or 1×3 vertical — and a style: Info (slate), Exercise (emerald), Warning (amber) or Success (green). Each card has a title and a rich text body.

Stacked cards

A vertical stack of colour-filled bands. Each item has its own background colour and the text colour is chosen automatically for contrast. Turn side text on for a two-part layout (label beside body) or off for a single full-width band.

Multi-column cards

The most flexible layout block. It has two settings groups:

• Block Settings — an optional block title above the columns, equal-height matching across cards, and JSON import options.
• Columns & Cards — add or remove columns, and within each column add cards with a title, rich text content, background and border colours, an optional badge (theme or gradient), and an optional checklist with a selectable list style.

Cards can be dragged to reorder within and between columns. Copy card and Paste card below move a card's full styling to another position or another block — the clipboard persists across slides, and Clear clipboard empties it.

Timeline

A horizontal segmented bar with numbered nodes and callouts that alternate above and below the line. Each step has a colour, a time-span label shown inside the bar, a title, an optional icon, and body text. Steps can be moved earlier or later, added and deleted. Because the time span is just a label, the same block works for roadmaps, process steps and course weeks.

Three buttons make the timeline AI-friendly: Sample JSON downloads a documented example you can hand to an assistant so it knows the exact format, Import loads a timeline from a file, and Export saves this timeline out.

Accordions

Collapsible title and content pairs, up to ten items per block. Each item can start open or closed. Ideal for FAQs, worked answers, and progressive disclosure in the HTML export.

Boxes and callouts

Info, Exercise and Warning boxes are rich-text blocks with a coloured background, a coloured left border and an icon. They carry into the HTML, PDF and PowerPoint exports with their colours intact.

Links and dividers

A Link block renders a labelled, styled link to an external resource. A Divider draws a horizontal rule — and doubles as a manual slide break when the deck is in slide layout.

Embedded HTML

An embedded-HTML block renders custom markup inside your slide, for embeds the other blocks don't cover. All HTML is sanitised before it is rendered and before it is exported — inline scripts are stripped, so embeds must be self-contained markup and CSS.

Slide Designer (16:9)

Turn this on from the Settings (gear) menu — 🎨 Slide Designer (16:9) — or start from the PowerPoint-Ready template, which enables it for you. Each slide becomes a fixed 16:9 canvas that cannot grow taller: the stage is the slide. What you lay out is what exports, one app slide to one PowerPoint slide, with no pagination and no size estimation.

Positioning objects

• Drag any block to move it; use the corner and edge handles to resize.
• Snap guides appear for slide centre and edges as you drag.
• Arrow keys nudge; Shift + arrows nudge further.
• Bring forward and Send backward control stacking order.
• Double-click a block to edit its content.
• Block positions are stored as percentages of the slide, so decks stay portable and backward compatible — blocks that have never been positioned get a sensible default layout.

Multi-select and grouping

• Shift/Ctrl/⌘ + click to add objects to the selection, or drag a marquee across empty canvas to sweep up everything it touches.
• Dragging any selected object moves the whole selection; arrow keys nudge them all; Delete removes them all.
• Ctrl/⌘ + G groups two or more objects (or use the Group button). Grouped objects show a dashed outline and a labelled bounding box, and selecting any member selects the whole group.
• Ctrl/⌘ + Shift + G ungroups.

Sizing text and media

• Selected text, citation and card blocks get A− and A+ buttons with a live percentage; click the percentage to reset to 100%. This is the same text-scale value the corner handles set, and it carries into the PowerPoint and PDF exports.
• Media blocks (video, image, gallery, embedded HTML) scale uniformly with their frame — shrink the frame and the media scales with it, matching the export's contain-fit behaviour. Text blocks keep their size and reflow.
• ⛶ Fit frame to content re-hugs a frame to its media's natural shape. Newly imported media auto-fits from the start.

Rulers and guides

The guides toggle and the slide-settings gear sit on the right of the "Edit Mode" banner, so they never cover a long slide title. The toggle is an icon button whose colour shows its state — grey when off, blue when on. Drag down from the top ruler for a horizontal guide, or right from the side ruler for a vertical one. Guides stay exactly where you place them across slides and reloads; Reset guides removes them all.

Dropping images onto a slide

Drag an image file anywhere onto a canvas slide and the image importer opens pre-loaded with that file, ready for alt text and a citation before it's saved as a new image block on that slide.

Detachable image citations

The 🔖 button on a selected image splits its citation into its own movable object, positioned in a full-width row beneath the image. A detached citation is still a real APA citation — it flows into the reference list and can be saved to the citation library — and it renders as a bare figure note with no background panel.

Slide Settings dialog

In designer mode the extra per-slide controls move into a Slide Settings dialog (the gear on the slide): title, subtitle, slide name, include-in-export, and add, remove or clear slide. The editor's header bar is sized to match the exported slide's header, and canvas text scales with the stage using the export's point sizes (14pt body, 22 and 26pt headings), so the layout you see lines up with what exports.

Full-screen editing controls

In full screen, both drawer arrows line up on the same row, the zoom stepper and Exit button combine into one compact top-right pill, and the slide back/forward navigation is centred on the top row so it clears the mode banner.

Title cards & branding

Opening and end title cards

A deck can open with a title card and close with an end card. Enable each one in the Settings tab (Title Card / End Title Card) and set the title, subtitle, background colour, whether course and instructor info appears, and whether the school logo appears.

Customize Title Card panel

Click a title card in the editor to open the Customize Title Card panel. It's a compact floating panel docked to the right with no dark backdrop, so the card stays fully visible while you edit — drag it by its header to move it out of the way. It also opens correctly while you're in full-screen preview.

• Colours — background and text colour use a swatch picker: a curated palette, your recently used colours (remembered across sessions), a custom colour wheel, and hex entry.
• Text Sizes — set the font size of the title, the subtitle, and the course/instructor text independently. The sizes carry into the HTML export.
• Course & Instructor Layout — keep course, name and email stacked, or flow them in one dot-separated row along the bottom.
• Image — add a title-card image and scale it with a 50–800px slider. The chosen size is honoured in the PowerPoint export, and the image keeps its real aspect ratio there.
• Background image — pick a preset or upload your own.

New title cards default to dark grey text on a light background so text stays visible when you drop a light background image behind it.

School logo

Settings menu → 🖼 School Logo Settings. Upload an institution logo, set its display size, and choose whether it appears on title cards. The logo is embedded in HTML and PowerPoint exports.

Deck name badge

Every slide carries a deck-name badge that scales with the slide, so it stays proportional whether the slide is small (edit mode with both panels open) or full screen. Turn off 🏷 Deck Name on Content Slides in the Settings menu to show it on title cards only. The preference persists per browser, saves with the deck, and is respected by the HTML export.

Design, backgrounds & CSS

Slide backgrounds

The background picker (Settings tab → Slide Background) opens with a live 16:9 preview of the pending background, complete with header bar and sample text, so you can judge it before applying.

Backgrounds can be applied deck-wide or to the current slide only.

Slide header colours

Each slide carries a coloured header bar named for its BOPPPS section. Choose one colour for all slides or different colours per section in Settings → Layout & Slides, then pick each section's colour. These colours carry into the HTML, PDF and PowerPoint exports.

Global slide CSS

Settings tab → Global Slide CSS accepts custom CSS applied across the whole deck, for styling the exports beyond what the pickers offer. Linked styles are inlined at export time so exported files stay self-contained.

Dark backgrounds

Slides with a dark background automatically switch to light text in the PowerPoint export, so you don't have to recolour text by hand.

APA citations & references

Citation support runs through the whole app, not just one block. Anything you cite anywhere can flow into a single reference list, and the same formatting logic drives the HTML, PDF and PowerPoint exports.

Source types

The citation editor supports:

Fields adapt to the type: author first and last name or organisation, contributors and their roles, year or full date, title, source, publisher, site name, version, URL, DOI, volume, issue, pages, retrieval date, page number, licence, and notes. Two checkboxes handle sources that have no page and sources with no licence information.

Live preview

As you fill the fields, the editor shows three live previews: the full reference-list entry, the parenthetical in-text citation, and the narrative in-text citation.

The citation library

Save any citation to a browser-local library and reuse it anywhere in any deck. The library has a search box and a type filter (All types, Book, Journal, Webpage, Video, Image, Software, AI), and each saved entry shows its formatted reference with a clickable source link.

Reference lists

Add a Reference List block — usually in Resources & Materials — and it gathers the citations used across the deck, de-duplicates them, and sorts them into APA order. Figure notes, table notes, video citations and detached image citations all feed into it.

Citations attached to media

• Images and gallery items get an APA figure note beneath them; the note renders as bare text with no background panel. Its source URL exports as a clickable hyperlink.
• Tables get a table number and a table note.
• Videos get an in-text citation with the source URL underneath.
• Audio blocks get a credit line.
• Adapted sources have their own checkbox so the note reads correctly.

Importing and exporting citations

The citation block has three file buttons: Sample JSON downloads a documented example so an AI knows the exact import format, Import loads citations from a file, and Export saves this block's citations out.

APA block quotes

The APA Quote block renders a formatted block quote with its in-text citation, keeping long quotations properly set off from body text.

Worksheets

A worksheet block turns part of a lesson into a student handout with questions, optional points, and a print view. Add one from the Insert panel's Sheet tool.

Worksheet settings

• Use points — toggle marks on or off for the whole worksheet.
• Worksheet title and total points.
• Description / instructions — what students should do.

Question types

Each question carries its own title or prompt and point value, and questions can be reordered and retyped after they're created.

Importing and printing

• Import Worksheet JSON — paste or load a worksheet file. An example file is linked from the worksheet Help dialog.
• Print worksheet — opens a clean, print-formatted student version with a name and date header. Print to PDF for distribution.
• Worksheets also carry into the HTML and PowerPoint exports.

Code blocks

Insert with the Code tool. A code block has two modes and a set of editor conveniences.

Modes

• Display code — shows the source with syntax highlighting, for teaching what code looks like.
• Render rich — renders HTML live inside a sandboxed preview, for showing what the code does.

Languages and options

Supported languages: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSON and plain text. Line numbers and soft wrap can each be toggled, and the editor becomes read-only in preview mode so you can't nudge code by accident while presenting.

A code block can carry a paired CSS panel, so an HTML sample and the stylesheet that formats it export together as a matched pair.

Citing code

Code blocks have their own citation modes so attribution is accurate about what you're crediting: the code itself, the underlying source it came from, or generative AI — with a field for the prompt used. All three flow into the reference list.

Shapes & draw-overs

The Shapes toolbar button (or any Draw-over tool in the Insert panel) opens the Shape Builder — a drawing canvas for annotating an image or building a simple diagram. What you draw is inserted into the slide as an image block.

Tools

Working in the builder

• Load a background image to annotate over, or start on a blank canvas.
• Adjust stroke colour, fill and thickness in the properties bar.
• Undo and Redo step through your drawing history; Delete removes the selected object; Clear empties the canvas.
• Insert when you're done — the drawing becomes a normal image block that can be moved, resized and cited like any other.

Typical uses: circling part of a diagram, drawing a process arrow over a screenshot, or sketching a quick concept map.

Images, video & audio

Two ways to source images

Image options

• Alt text — always add it; it's what screen readers announce.
• Caption — shown under the image.
• Size preset — Small, Medium, Large or Full Width. These presets are honoured in the PowerPoint export.
• Citation — attach a figure note with author, source, date, licence and adaptation status.
• Remove current image clears the image without deleting the block.

Galleries

A gallery holds several images in a grid of 2, 3 or 4 columns. Each item can have its own alt text, caption and citation. The chosen column count carries into the PowerPoint export.

Video

Supported platforms: YouTube, Vimeo and Panopto, plus a raw embed-code option for anything else. Paste a URL and the app extracts the video ID — YouTube watch, share (youtu.be) and embed URL forms are all recognised.

Choose an aspect ratio: 16:9, 4:3, 1:1 or 21:9. Add an APA video citation and the source URL appears under the video in exports.

Audio

Audio blocks render a player with an optional credit line beneath, which flows into the reference list like any other citation.

Templates & Template Manager

Starter templates

The template picker (the New button) offers these starting points:

You can also import a JSON file from the template picker to carry on with an existing lesson.

Template Manager

Settings menu → 🧩 Template Manager. It has three parts:

• Template Details — give the template a name and optional notes about how to use it.
• Template Actions — save the current deck as a template, or apply a saved one.
• Template Library — your saved templates, stored in this browser.

The Template Manager is also where the blank-template LLM workflow lives — see AI / LLM workflow.

Slide templates vs lesson templates

📥 Download Slide Template and 📄 Apply Template to Slides in the Settings menu move styling — header colours, backgrounds, title-card configuration — without touching your content. Use them to make a set of lessons look like one course.

Settings tab (Template Controls)

The Settings workspace collects everything the toolbar menus expose, plus a few options that live only here. It has three tabs — Settings, Design and Export — and shows an "Unsaved changes" marker with the time of the last save.

Settings tab

• Session Details — week number, date, instructor name, instructor email, course title.
• Layout & Slides — body layout (accordion or slides), slide deck name, and slide header colour mode (one colour for all, or per section, with a colour for each).
• Mode & Branding — toggle editing mode and manage the school logo.
• Title Card — enable the opening card and set its title, subtitle, background colour, course info visibility and logo visibility.
• End Title Card — the same controls for the closing slide.

Design tab

• Slide Background — colours, gradients, patterns and images, with a live 16:9 preview.
• Global Slide CSS — custom CSS applied deck-wide.
• Content blocks and layouts — the same block palette and PowerPoint-style layout presets available from the Insert panel, applied to a chosen slide.

Export tab

• File Naming — base file name and version number for every export.
• JSON Exports — full and slim JSON.
• Presentation Exports — HTML, PDF and PowerPoint.
• Import — load previously saved content.
• Advanced — the LLM template export and other advanced options.

Exporting — every format

Open the Export ▾ menu in the Slides toolbar. Set the base file name and version in the toolbar first — every export uses them.

The full export menu

Save vs Export

Save in the toolbar is a shortcut: it bumps the version number and downloads a full JSON in one click. Use it as your habitual checkpoint while you work, and use the Export menu when you need a delivery format.

Partial export — Import/Export Slides

The transfer dialog has Export and Import tabs. In Export mode, tick the sections, slides and blocks you want and click Export selected at the bottom of the window. In Import mode, load a file and choose which of its pieces to bring in. This is how you build a shared bank of activities and reuse them across a course.

File naming and versions

The Name field plus the version number produce names like Week1_Module_v3.json. Leave the version box empty and it follows the deck's automatic version; type a number to pin it.

PowerPoint export in depth

Export ▾ → 📊 PowerPoint (.pptx) converts the lesson slide by slide into a native PowerPoint file. Title cards become title slides; content slides get a coloured BOPPPS section header bar. The same option is available from the Control Panel and the Template Controls page.

What maps to native PowerPoint elements

• Rich text — headings, bold, italic, underline, links, nested lists.
• Tables, embedded images and galleries.
• Info, exercise and warning boxes.
• Code blocks, accordions, cards and multi-column cards (titles, images and content).
• Video links and worksheets.
• YouTube videos become native playable online-video frames, with the video's true 16:9 thumbnail as a poster frame so PowerPoint's edit view shows a preview rather than a grey box. Playback happens in Slide Show and needs internet. Vimeo, Panopto and raw embeds fall back to a hyperlink line.

Design fidelity

• Deck-wide and per-slide backgrounds: solid colours carry across directly; gradients and patterns are approximated by their base colour; background images are embedded, with a translucent white content panel behind text for readability.
• Custom per-section header bar colours, and title, section and end card background images.
• Image size presets (small, medium, large, full), gallery grids in the chosen 1–4 column layout, and video aspect ratios (16:9, 4:3, 1:1, 21:9).
• Card grids export as colour-tinted table layouts matching the app's 2×1, 2×2, 3×1 and 1×3 arrangements.
• Dark slide backgrounds automatically switch to light text.

How slides get split

• In Slide Designer mode, designer frames map 1:1 onto slide coordinates — one app slide is exactly one PowerPoint slide, with no pagination and no size estimation.
• Otherwise, a slide holding more than fits one 16:9 slide is split automatically: text splits at paragraph boundaries, tables split at row boundaries and repeat the header row, and follow-on slides repeat the section header with "(cont.)".
• Slide-break dividers still control boundaries manually; auto-pagination only kicks in on overflow.
• Consecutive text on a slide renders as one flowed text box, so estimate errors can't cause overlapping shapes.
• Turn on 📐 16:9 Export Guides while editing to see roughly where a split will land, plus a "fits one slide" badge when no split is needed.

Citations in PowerPoint

APA citations carry through: video in-text citations with the source URL under each video, figure and table notes under images and gallery items, and audio credits under audio blocks — using the same formatting logic as the HTML export. Image and gallery citations export as clickable hyperlinks.

Notes and limits

• The PowerPoint library loads on demand, so the app's normal load time is unaffected. The first export takes a moment longer.
• App-hosted background and preset images are embedded automatically. Remote images that can't be fetched are dropped gracefully rather than failing the export — a background image that can't be reached falls back to its base colour.
• Check the exported deck before class. Fonts and text metrics differ slightly between the browser and PowerPoint.

Importing & opening files

Four ways in

What happens on import

Imported files are validated against the lesson schema, normalised, and repaired where possible — older files are migrated forward to the current format automatically. Sections, slides, blocks, week and date metadata, title cards and styling are all restored.

If an import is rejected

• Confirm the file is valid JSON — a truncated AI response is the most common cause.
• Check the file is a lesson export, not a worksheet, timeline or citation file. Those import into their own blocks, not into the whole deck.
• If an AI produced it, re-run the blank-template workflow: it constrains the model to filling fields rather than inventing structure.

After any import, press Save to write a fresh, known-good export of the merged result.

AI / LLM workflow

The app is built to hand work to an AI assistant and take it back safely. Three exports support this, in increasing order of strictness.

1 · Prompt + JSON template

From the AI Prompt tab, fill in the form and use Export .json template. You get a prompt and a matching JSON structure. Good for exploratory drafting, where the assistant has room to be creative.

2 · LLM Template (stable JSON)

Export ▾ → 🤖 LLM Template produces a schema-versioned JSON that describes your lesson's meaning rather than its markup, along with generation guidance, the deck output schema, a JSON Schema validator, block type field specifications, self-check code and worked examples. Hand it to an assistant when you want it to understand every block type available.

3 · Blank Template + Companion Pack (strictest)

From the AI Prompt tab, Export Blank Template + Companion Pack downloads two files. Upload both to the assistant with this instruction:

Because the structure is fixed and IDs are preserved, the returned file imports cleanly. The completed JSON is validated before it's accepted, so a model that ignored the rules is caught rather than silently mangling your deck.

Block-level AI helpers

The Timeline and Citation blocks each offer a Sample JSON download — a documented example of that block's exact format. Hand one to an assistant and ask it to produce more of the same, then import the result into the block.

Verify before you teach

Presenting & printing

Presenting from the app

• Press F or click Full for full-screen presentation.
• Advance with → or Space; go back with ←; leave with Esc.
• The top-right pill holds the zoom stepper, a Fit slide to screen button, and Exit.
• Both side drawers stay usable in full screen, with their arrows lined up on the same row.
• Press E to drop into Edit mode without leaving full screen — handy for fixing a typo mid-class.

Presenting from an export

• HTML export — a self-contained page with in-page navigation, a slide list, collapsible sections and keyboard navigation. Works from a USB stick, an LMS, or any web host.
• PowerPoint export — for presenter view, speaker notes, and colleagues who need to edit in Office.
• PDF export — one slide per page; the most reliable format when you can't control the room's software.

Printing and handouts

• Export to PDF and print, or print the HTML export from the browser.
• Worksheet blocks have their own Print worksheet button that produces a clean student version with a name and date header — no slide chrome.
• For a text-only handout, switch Body Layout to accordion and export HTML.

Before you present — a short checklist

1. Open the outline drawer and turn on Issues only. Fix or delete any empty slides.
2. Check that every slide you want is set to include in export.
3. Turn on 16:9 Export Guides and look for slides that will split unexpectedly.
4. Run through in full screen once, checking that videos load and images appear.
5. Export both a JSON backup and your delivery format, and put them somewhere that isn't this browser.

Data safety, autosave & undo

Where your work lives

Everything is stored in your browser's local storage on your own device. Nothing is transmitted to or stored on any server. That's good for privacy, and it means there is no cloud copy to fall back on.

• Your lessons never leave your device until you export them.
• Clearing browser data, using a different browser or device, or working in a private/incognito window will lose unsaved work.
• Browser storage is finite. Very large decks with many embedded images can hit the limit — Slim JSON and server-path images both help.

Autosave and recovery

The editor autosaves to local storage every couple of seconds, keyed to the lesson's week and date. If it finds a newer autosave when you return, it shows an "Auto-saved Content Found" prompt asking whether to recover the previous session. Autosave is a crash net, not a backup — it lives in the same browser storage that clearing your cache wipes.

Undo

Ctrl/⌘ + Z undoes the last structural change — adding, deleting, moving or editing blocks and slides. A brief ↩️ Undo indicator confirms it. Text you're typing uses your browser's normal undo inside the field.

The leave-page warning

The browser will ask you to confirm before you refresh or close the tab, as a reminder to export. Don't rely on it — some browsers suppress it.

A backup routine that works

1. Set a file name and version once at the start of a session.
2. Press Save after each significant chunk of work. Every press bumps the version, so you get _v1, _v2, _v3 rather than one file you keep overwriting.
3. Keep those JSON files in cloud storage or a course folder — not only in your Downloads folder.
4. Export the delivery format (HTML, PDF or PPTX) only when you're ready to share; it's generated from the JSON and can always be regenerated.

Troubleshooting

Content and editing

Media

Exports

Layout and navigation

Still stuck? Note the app version (bottom of the Settings menu), what you were doing, and which browser you're using — then share those details with whoever supports your installation.

Glossary