Gamma for Teachers: Hand It the Layout, Not the Curriculum Judgement

It is morning recess and the geography panel head, who runs the Secondary 3 subject-selection evening, turns her laptop round. Fourteen slides, four different font sizes, and on one of them a chart sitting on top of the line beneath it. "The handouts go to the printer at eight tonight," she says, "and I don't mind the work, I just can't make it look right." Her outline goes into Gamma and twelve minutes later the layout problems are gone — and not one word of the content is any better.

Gamma really does handle layout better than most hand-built teacher decks, and it deserves a straight recommendation for that. But its credit metering and its age-16 clause together decide that it belongs on the outward-facing side of a school.

Who it was built for

Gamma takes an outline, a file or a URL and returns a stack of laid-out, illustrated cards you can share as a link, export to PDF and PowerPoint, or publish as a web page. After generation you can revise by conversation — tell it to turn one card into a three-column table and it will.

The feature list tells you who it serves: publishing to custom domains, ten of them on Pro and a hundred on Ultra; per-viewer engagement analytics; API keys from Pro upwards. Those are marketing and consulting requirements, not staffroom ones. There is an official educators page, but that is a marketing page, not a second product.

So the slot it fills in a school is outward communication: parents' evenings, subject-selection briefings, school profiles, project showcases, panel reports to outside bodies. There are no classes, no student progress, no marking and no teacher monitoring — not flaws, simply parts of the job it never took on.

Building the parents' evening deck

Paste an outline, not a one-line prompt

Create new offers three routes: paste text, generate from a single prompt, or import a file or URL. Whenever the content touches school policy, use the first one only. The reason is blunt: the single-prompt version always looks the most complete, and the most complete version is usually the one with the most invented in it.

A prompt that earns its keep looks roughly like this:

Below is our school's outline for the Secondary 3 subject-selection evening. Build 10 cards from it, in Traditional Chinese for a Hong Kong parent audience.
Add nothing I have not written. Every date, time slot, staff name and phone number should read "to be filled".
Keep each card body under 60 words, bullet points, clean professional imagery, no cartoons.
[paste your own outline here]

Note the free plan's ceiling of 10 cards per prompt and 50,000 tokens of input, against 100 cards and 100,000 tokens on Plus and above. A twelve-card deck on the free plan means two passes.

Two checks before it leaves the building

First, search for the placeholder and fill in every instance. The model writes dates, phone numbers and job titles that read entirely convincingly, and it gets them wrong in a well-presented way, which is how an invented examination week ends up printed on a handout.

Second, check the numbers and the policy wording against the circular that has already gone out — test and examination arrangements, phone rules, anything with a date. A parent coming back with "your slide says a different week" costs far more than the five minutes of checking.

Then export twice: PDF for parents to take away, PowerPoint onto the venue machine so a shaky network cannot sink the evening. Free-plan output carries the "Made with Gamma" badge, and whether that is acceptable at a public event is your call.

Gamma sells layout, not content. Handing it the curriculum judgement is like asking a designer to write your assessment schedule.

Credits and the bill

Where credits actually go

Monthly allowances run in four tiers: 400 on Free, 1,000 on Plus, 4,000 on Pro, 20,000 on Ultra. The 400 arrives once at sign-up and never refreshes; after that it is referrals at 200 credits each, capped at 2,000, or an upgrade.

The hard part to budget is unit cost. Gamma's developer documentation puts image generation anywhere from 2 to 125 credits per image, so the same deck can cost dozens of times more depending on the model, and every Agent revision counts too. That is why "about a dozen decks a term" cannot be converted into a credit figure. Paying users can top up at US$6 per 1,500 credits, sold only in 1,500 blocks.

Multiplied by a hundred

Gamma states plainly that subscriptions are per user and two users pay double. Put that against a school's headcount and the weight shows: a hundred staff with accounts is a linear cost, and not one student seat is included.

We could not load the official pricing page while writing this, and third-party trackers disagree with each other — Plus at both US$9 and US$12 a month, Pro at both US$18 and US$25, Ultra between US$90 and US$100, Team and Business commonly quoted at US$20 and US$40 per seat per month on minimums of two and ten seats. None of that could be confirmed officially, so verify before budgeting. Three things are confirmable: billing is per user, annual is 28% cheaper than monthly, and Ultra is monthly only at present, so it cannot take that 28%.

The pragmatic move is not to buy a licence for everyone. Give accounts to the three to five roles that genuinely present outwards — administration, communications, careers and life planning, the form coordinator who handles admissions — and let everyone else borrow the workspace when a real need appears.

The age-16 sentence

Gamma's Terms of Use require users to represent that they are at least sixteen. In Hong Kong terms that is Secondary 4 and above; Secondary 3 and below should not hold accounts.

This is not small print. It rules out every lesson plan built around students making group presentations in Gamma, however safe the tool feels. And it connects to a second setting: personal workspaces default to allowing content to improve Gamma's AI features, with the opt-out in Settings under Data Controls, while Team and Business workspaces are excluded and locked. Student work, case notes and named lists should not go in until that is handled.

What students actually need — a scaffolding tutor that gives hints rather than answers, safety gating and monitoring — was never within a presentation tool's range anyway.

Where it belongs

If your school already has Canva for Education or a full Microsoft 365 licence, Gamma's marginal value is mostly speed and polish. Both are worth a great deal the night before parents' evening and considerably less in an ordinary lesson.

The sensible division of labour is to generate teaching content where the scheme of work, learning intentions and rubrics live — see drafting lesson plans and the school knowledge base — and only paste the settled outline into Gamma for layout. It also makes the paperwork easier: a per-school annual fee with AI usage included is simpler to defend on a funding application, capped at HK$500,000 per school, than a hundred per-seat licences plus a floating credit bill.

Common misreadings

• The claim: the free plan comes with 400 credits, so it is free to keep using. What actually happens: those 400 arrive once at sign-up and never refresh. It is a trial allowance without a countdown clock, which is generous in one way and misleading in another, because plenty of users assume next month brings more.
• The claim: upgrade to Pro and usage stops being a concern. What actually happens: 4,000 credits a month sounds ample until you price images at between 2 and 125 credits each and count every Agent revision. One image-heavy month can clear it, and then you are buying 1,500 at a time for US$6.
• The claim: the generated deck is ready to print. What actually happens: it states dates, phone numbers, job titles and policy wording with complete confidence. Every number and every policy line needs checking against the official circular before it goes out.

Three things to try on Monday

1. Take a deck you built last term and rebuild it from its outline. Because you already know the right answer, this run measures two things: the time saved, and what the model added that you never wrote.
2. Note your credit balance before and after generating one image-heavy card, and work out your own per-card cost. Only with that figure does an upgrade discussion mean anything.
3. Open Settings, Data Controls, and check the training opt-out; at the same time, write down who in the school currently holds a Gamma account and under which email. Doing this before circular drafts start going in is far cheaper than doing it after.

To compare the alternatives, see the 2026 overview of AI tools for teachers.