Gamma for Teachers: A Parents' Evening Deck in 15 Minutes, and the Age-16 Clause

It is eleven at night before parents' evening and you are still nudging three text boxes into alignment in PowerPoint. Gamma will produce the same deck in about fifteen minutes, and it will look better than most hand-built teacher decks — we are not going to be coy about that. But before recommending it to a whole staffroom, two sentences have to come first: the free allowance is 400 credits granted once at sign-up and never refreshed, and Gamma's own terms require users to be at least sixteen, which in Hong Kong terms puts Secondary 3 and below out of bounds.

What this tool actually is

Gamma generates presentations, documents and websites with AI. You give it an outline, a file or a URL, and it returns a stack of laid-out, illustrated "cards" that you can share as a link, export to PDF or PowerPoint, or publish as a web page in one click.

Who is it really built for? People who present outwards for a living without design skills — marketing, startups, consultants. Education is one use case among many. There is an official educators page, but that is a marketing page, not a separate education product.

For a school, the honest positioning is as a staff communication tool: parents' evenings, information sessions, school profiles, topic-introduction decks, project showcases. It is not a teaching platform. There are no classes, no student progress, no marking and no teacher monitoring. Every teacher can use it; student accounts run into the age-16 clause, so senior secondary project work is arguable and primary or junior secondary is not.

Key features

As officially described:

• AI Creations — generate a deck, document, website or social post from a prompt, a file or a URL.
• Card-based layout — each card lays itself out, so nothing has to be aligned by hand and the design does not break when the text length changes.
• AI Agent — revise after generation by conversation, for example "turn card three into a table" or "make the whole deck more formal".
• Tiered image models — basic, advanced, premium and ultra image models, with higher tiers consuming more credits; Ultra unlocks models such as GPT Image Detailed and Ideogram Quality.
• Export and share — share links plus PDF and PowerPoint export; free-plan output carries a "Made with Gamma" badge that paid plans remove.
• Custom domains and analytics — Pro publishes up to 10 multi-page sites on your own domains with per-viewer engagement detail, Ultra up to 100.
• API and connectors — API keys are available on Pro, Ultra, Teams and Business; the ChatGPT and Claude connectors work on every plan and consume credits the same way as API calls.
• Studio Mode — an Ultra early-access feature that generates full-image slides and social assets.

Full tutorial

The scenario: you are a Secondary 1 form teacher with a twenty-minute slot in front of thirty-odd parents, covering the year's class goals, homework and assessment arrangements, phone and social media guidance, and home-school communication channels.

Step 1 — sign up and check the balance. Register at gamma.app with your school email. Gamma states there is no traditional free trial: a new account lands on the Free plan with 400 credits that do not expire but never refresh. Check the credit total at the top right of the home page before you start, so you know what you are spending.

Step 2 — choose how to generate. Click Create new, then Generate. Three routes: Paste in text (paste an outline, most controllable), Generate (one prompt, fastest but most likely to invent things), and Import a file or URL. For a parents' evening deck, use Paste in text, because the content includes school policy and the AI should not be improvising.

Step 3 — paste the outline. Use the block below, replacing the bracketed parts with your own details.

Create a 12-card deck for a Secondary 1 parents' evening at a Hong Kong secondary school. Language: Traditional Chinese, Hong Kong usage.
Tone: professional and warm, addressed to parents, not student-facing slang.

Structure:
1. Cover — [school name] Secondary 1 Parents' Evening, [date]
2. Tonight's running order, four items, each with a time
3. Three class goals for the year at Secondary 1
4. Subject arrangements and expected weekly homework load
5. Assessment arrangements, an overview of test and examination weeks, as a table
6. Phone and social media guidance, three points, positively framed
7. Three key school rules to reinforce
8. Three concrete suggestions for supporting learning at home
9. Home-school communication channels — handbook, circulars, email, phone, as a table
10. Overview of Secondary 1 extra-curricular activities and service learning
11. Three frequently asked parent questions with answers
12. Contact details and question time

Constraints: leave every date, time, phone number and staff name blank and write "to be filled" instead. Do not invent them. Keep each card under 60 words and use bullet points. Use clean, professional imagery, not cartoons.

Step 4 — set options and generate. Gamma will offer card count, layout mode and image source. Note that the free plan caps generation at 10 cards per prompt with a 50,000-token input limit, while Plus and above allow 100 cards and 100,000 tokens. A 12-card deck on the free plan means generating in two passes or adding cards manually.

Step 5 — hunt down every "to be filled". Do not skip this. The AI writes plausible dates, phone numbers and staff names, so search the deck for the placeholder text and fill each one in, then check that the assessment table and the school-rule wording match the official circular.

Step 6 — apply the school's visual identity. Pick a theme in the right-hand panel and set the primary colour to the school colour. Custom fonts require Ultra; headers, footers and password protection come with Pro and above.

Step 7 — refine with the AI Agent. Tell the Agent "turn card five into a three-column table of subject, test week and examination week". Remember that on paid plans credits are consumed mainly by Agent edits, top-tier models and API calls.

Step 8 — export. PDF for parents to take away, PowerPoint as a venue backup so a network problem cannot sink the evening, and the share link behind a QR code in the circular. Free-plan output carries the "Made with Gamma" badge; decide for yourself whether that is acceptable at a public event.

Pros and cons

Pros

• The decks genuinely look good. That is Gamma's real value and there is no reason to pretend otherwise.
• Card-based layout removes the alignment work, and editing content does not break the design.
• The path from outline to finished artefact is short, which pays off exactly for one-off but public-facing decks.
• PDF and PowerPoint export means you are not locked into one format.
• The 400 free credits do not expire, so it is a real trial rather than a seven-day countdown.
• Team and Business workspace content is automatically excluded from AI training, and the setting is locked.

Cons

• The credit system is opaque. The same deck can cost ten times more depending on the image model; the official developer docs list image generation from 2 to 125 credits each. A teacher cannot easily forecast a term's usage.
• Free credits never refresh, which makes the free plan a trial in all but name.
• The terms require users to be at least 16, which excludes primary and junior secondary pupils from having accounts.
• There are no education features at all — no classes, no assignments, no student progress, no teacher monitoring, no safety gating.
• Billing is per user. Gamma states plainly that subscriptions are per user and two users are billed double, so cost scales linearly across 100 staff.
• Personal workspaces default to allowing content for AI training, and opting out is a manual step in Data Controls.
• Accuracy rests entirely on the teacher. It will state dates, figures and policy wording with total confidence and may have invented all of them.
• We could not verify a full Traditional Chinese (Hong Kong) interface, nor any official education discount.

Pricing and fee breakdown

Why does the price column say unverified? Because we could not load the gamma.app pricing page while writing, and third-party trackers contradict each other: Plus is reported at both US$9 and US$12 a month, Pro at both US$18 and US$25, Ultra between US$90 and US$100, with Team and Business commonly quoted at US$20 and US$40 per seat per month on minimums of 2 and 10 seats respectively. None of those figures could be confirmed on an official page, so check the pricing page yourself before budgeting. What we can confirm is the structure: subscriptions are per user, annual billing is 28% cheaper than monthly, and top-up credits are US$6 per 1,500.

The hidden costs are three. First, multiply by 100: even on the lower reported annual rates, a 100-staff school lands in five figures of US dollars a year, and not one student seat is included. Second, credits burn faster than expected, because Agent edits and high-tier image models are the real consumers, so an image-heavy term can hit the ceiling and force a top-up or a wait. Third, Ultra is monthly only at present, so it cannot take the 28% annual discount.

What happens when the free tier runs out? Generation stops, but finished decks remain viewable and exportable. After a paid plan is cancelled, Gamma states the account returns to Free at the end of the billing period with credits reset to 400, while separately purchased credits remain for a year.

Compared with the alternatives

Honestly: 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 lot the night before parents' evening and rather less in a normal lesson.

Side by side with Edor.ai

Where Gamma genuinely wins: visual quality. Gamma makes better-looking decks than a general education platform does, and that is its craft. We do not build presentation aesthetics and will not pretend to beat it. The rational teacher workflow is probably to generate the teaching content where the scheme of work and marking rubrics live, then paste the outline into Gamma for the design. The two do not conflict.

Why a school still needs a school-based platform

The gaps Gamma leaves are not flaws; they are a different remit.

It does not handle students. The age-16 clause, no classes, no gating, no monitoring — any scenario where pupils use AI directly is simply out of scope. The student side needs a scaffolded tutor that gives hints rather than answers and proper safety gating.

It does not know your curriculum. Re-explaining the school scheme of work and learning intentions for every topic-introduction deck is an invisible cost; a school knowledge base is uploaded once and stays useful — see the school knowledge base and RAG.

Per-seat pricing works against schools. A per-user subscription across 100 staff scales linearly, and metered credits add a variable bill on top, so the budget cannot be fixed. A per-school annual fee with AI usage included is the structure that is easiest to defend in a funding report.

Data and the freedom to leave. Personal workspaces default to allowing content to improve Gamma's AI and the school has to opt out; a school platform's default should be the reverse — data belongs to the school, exportable in full, in one click, at any time.

Edor.ai is built for Hong Kong schools, teachers and students, it is the only thing we do, and we serve those schools with our best effort across nine modules: lesson planning, AI tutoring, marking, differentiation, oral practice, student data analysis, administrative workload, the PIE planning cycle and a school knowledge base. None of that means Gamma is not worth using. It means using it in the right place.

Takeaway

Gamma is one of the few tools we would recommend to a Hong Kong teacher without hedging, provided three things are clear: the free credits are one-off, per-seat subscriptions get expensive at 100 staff, and the terms require users to be 16 or over so student use needs care. Use it for outward-facing decks and leave teaching content to a system that knows the curriculum and gates students properly. Next, read a lesson plan in 30 minutes with AI to get the content right, or compare options in the 2026 overview of AI tools for teachers.