Written, predictably, on my third coffee.

After about fifteen years I still build or refine a slide deck for nearly every lesson. Every couple of years someone announces the death of the slide deck: death by boredom, death by passivity, death by death-by-PowerPoint. They're not wrong about the bad ones. They're wrong about what mine are for.

What is a slide deck actually for?

Not a performance. Not a textbook I read aloud. For me a deck is a live lesson plan, the thing that keeps me accountable and reminds me where I'm going.

That sounds small until you count the day. Five classes. Different topics, different energy, different rooms. One of those classes runs SL and HL IB Biology side by side, which is two preps in one. This year I had a student on their own unique curriculum in that same room, so make it three. By the fourth lesson, the deck isn't a teaching aid. It's the only reason I know what I'm doing and when. It carries the cognitive load so I don't have to.

The slides are where I am. The deck is where I'm going.

For the new teacher, it's scaffolding

If you're starting out, a deck does something quieter and more valuable than fill the screen. It forces you to organise your thinking and structure your questioning before twenty-eight teenagers are watching you do it live.

You're piecing a lesson together from a million resources, a textbook diagram here, a past-paper question there, something half-remembered from a course in 2019. The deck is where all of that lands and gets a running order. Building it is the planning. The slides are just what's left over.

My decks have a shape now

Fifteen years of trial and error settled into a spine:

Starters, learning outcomes, information, activities, plenaries.

Same skeleton, every time. And here's the part people miss when they call slides rigid: the structure is what lets me stay organic.

I don't use all of it. I never do. What survives contact with the actual room depends on the learners, the time of day, how I'm feeling, and the direction of the wind. The deck isn't a script I'm chained to, it's a menu of every trick I've got up my sleeve, laid out where I can see them. I pick what the lesson needs. The rest waits. What the deck does hold me to is the timing: where this lesson sits in the week, where the week sits in the term, whether I'm on pace for content that is, to put it mildly, enormous.

Routine, again, is what buys the freedom to improvise. Same as the three-week loop. The structure isn't the cage. It's what lets me off the leash.

Enter the WebSheet

Here's where the fun is. I've been building a lot with AI lately, this whole site for a start, and my current favourite output is HTML. Specifically: a worksheet that's actually a static webpage. Self-contained, interactive, works offline, no login, no platform, nothing to update. I'm coining the term right here: the WebSheet.

I've converted a good number of presentations into them, and they're a genuinely different animal. A slide is something I talk over. A WebSheet is something a student does. Same content, but the work moves from my mouth to their hands, which is where it should have been all along. (This is most of what I'm building over at Free Period, if you want to see the workings.)

listen · freeperiod.ai episode 4 The Death of PowerPoint?

The deck doesn't disappear when I do this. It becomes the storyboard for the thing I build next.

The swing is coming, and I welcome it

I think we're heading for a correction. More chalk-and-talk. More co-constructing models on the board with students instead of revealing a finished one on slide nine. More hands-on, experiential, get-the-devices-off-the-table learning, as everyone quietly tires of staring at screens. And the evidence on active learning has been clear for a while.

Good. I'm not precious about it. The best moments in my room were never the slides anyway.

But the deck survives that swing, because it was never really the screen-facing artefact people think it is. It's the spine underneath the lesson, whatever the lesson happens to look like on the day. Chalk-and-talk still needs a running order. Co-construction still needs you to know where the model is going. The deck is just where I keep that.

So, are slide decks done?

Not while I'm teaching five classes a day with three preps in one room. Not while a new teacher needs somewhere to think before they perform. Not while there's a lesson to keep on the rails.

And honestly, not while I need three or four coffees a day to stay cognisant. The deck and I are both running on the same thing: a structure strong enough to hold the day together, and just enough caffeine to remember what it was.