AhaSlides Review: 6 Key Takeaways and Insights

AhaSlides is a software that allows you to add interactive quizzes, polls, and other activities to your live presentations.

Whether you’re a teacher at an elementary school, a university-level professor, or a corporate team leader trying to make team meetings more engaging, AhaSlides has useful features for everyone.

In this review, I will be going over AhaSlides’ features, its pros and cons, its pricing structure, and more. After reading this review, you will have a pretty good idea of whether AhaSlides is right for you.

Let’s get into it.

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AhaSlides Overview

AhaSlides is a presentation software that allows you to create interactive presentations with activities such as quizzes, rating scales, and word clouds.

It integrates with popular presentation software that you are most likely already using, such as Microsoft Teams, PowerPoint, and Google Slides.

Read on to learn about the various features of AhaSlides.

AhaSlides Features

Quizzes

AhaSlides features a quiz generator powered by artificial intelligence. There are six types of quizzes, including multiple choice quizzes and “type the answer” quizzes, that you can host during your live presentations or virtual classes.

The AI tool allows you to convert text into question sets instantly.

To add a bit of a competitive aspect and make things more interesting, you can let players compete with each other as teams. There are also leaderboards, timers, countdowns, and streaks to make things more difficult for students and encourage them to do better.

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Polls

In addition to quizzes, you can spice up your presentations by adding live polls. Polls come in several styles, including multiple-choice questions and rating scales that allow participants to rate how much they like a certain idea.

Another type of poll allows participants to submit custom answers. That is a great way to get personalized feedback from your participants.

Unlike quizzes, there are no right or wrong answers to polls.

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Spinner Wheels

Spinner Wheels are wheels that spin and select a random choice.

They can be used for purposes such as picking a new venue for the next corporate event or selecting an activity for the class to participate in together.

Idea Boards

An idea board is a fantastic brainstorming tool that you can use to get new ideas from your team. It allows participants to submit ideas, which then appear on a central idea board that everyone can view.

Participants can then upvote the submissions of others. That way, you can let the best idea win.

People can vote anonymously or use their email addresses or avatars. Allowing anonymous voting is a great way to understand what your audience truly thinks, without the fear of what others might say influencing voting results.

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Word Clouds

A word cloud is another type of brainstorming tool. Here, too, participants can submit their own responses.

However, these responses should ideally be single words or short phrases. All submitted phrases then appear in a central “word cloud.”

There are a few use cases for this. You can use it as an icebreaker by asking people to submit responses indicating how they are feeling that day, for example.

Or, you can ask them how they feel about a certain idea you plan on implementing.

If you are a teacher, you can use a word cloud to check your students’ understanding of a topic. Based on how many correct answers you get to a question, you can determine whether you need to dwell on it a bit longer.

You can hide inappropriate responses, which is sometimes a problem when holding virtual classes with young students.

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Live Q&As

Q&A (Question and Answer) sessions are great for engaging your audience. You can ask your audience questions or answer questions they have.

For example, at the end of a live class, you can hold a Q&A session so students can get answers to things that have been bothering them.

If you are implementing a new policy in the workplace, you can hold a Q&A session so people can learn more about what this policy will mean for them.

Participants can ask questions anonymously. That removes the fear of how others might judge them for asking what they fear to be a silly question.

In addition, participants can upvote questions submitted by others. That allows you, as the teacher, to get an idea of which issues your students have been struggling with the most.

If you think a question is important, you can pin it to the top. You can also mark questions as answered so you can move on to other questions.

With moderation mode, you can even assign a moderator to approve questions before they appear on the screen. If you have limited time, it can help you avoid questions you already answered.

It can also help prevent inappropriate questions from appearing on the screen.

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Rating Scales

Rating scales allow participants to rate different factors. For example, if you aren’t sure if the course materials the school provides are enough, you can ask students to rate them for factors such as ease of understanding, comprehensiveness, and how challenging they are.

The results will be displayed in a graph.

Random Team Generator

I mentioned that you can pit teams against each other. But how can you go about selecting those teams?

Choosing who goes on which team can be tricky. People might get upset that you assigned them to a certain team.

Fortunately, AhaSlides has a Random Team Generator tool to address this problem. It will create teams and assign team members randomly, driven purely by an algorithm.

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Integrations

AhaSlides integrates with the following tools:

• Google Slides
• Microsoft PowerPoint
• Microsoft Teams
• YouTube
• Hopin

If you are already using one of the above live video or presentation software, you can still use AhaSlides without switching to a new one.

Templates

AhaSlides offers templates to help you easily create interactive presentations and quizzes for specific use cases. For example, to get your live classes going on the right foot, you can use the “Ice Breakers for Class” template.

If you’re a team leader, you can use the “Quick Team Building” template.

There are thousands of templates, and you can use the search bar to easily find one that suits your needs.

Of course, you don’t have to choose a template; you can also create a presentation from scratch.

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Pricing

AhaSlides offers a forever free plan that allows you access to all activities (polls, Q&As, quizzes, etc.). However, the audience size is restricted to only seven people.

In other words, if you are a teacher, it won’t be enough if you have more than seven students. For small teams, though, it could be sufficient.

Fortunately, pricing for education is a lot cheaper than pricing for corporate use. Let’s go over pricing for education first.

Educational Pricing

• Edu Small, $2.95/month
  • Audience size of 25
  • Custom background
  • Collect audience info
  • Export results as an Excel file
  • Export slides as images
• Edu Medium, $5.45/month
  • Audience size of 50
  • Everything in Edu Small
• Edu Large, $7.65/month
  • Audience size of 200
  • Audience authentication
  • Q&A moderation
  • Video calls with audience

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Business Pricing

• Essential, $23.95/month or $95.40/year
  • Audience size of 50
  • Collect audience info
  • Custom background
  • Export results as an Excel file
  • Export slides as images
• Plus, $32.95/month or $131.40/year
  • Audience size of 200
  • Everything in Essential
• Pro, $49.95/month or $191.40/year
  • Audience size of 10,000
  • Custom logos and branding
  • Audience authentication
  • Q&A moderation
  • Video calls with audience
  • Audio and font library
  • Participation link

For business plans, you can get a discount if you purchase licenses in bulk.

Since pricing is subject to change, check the pricing page for updated educational and corporate pricing.

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Conclusion

AhaSlides is great for spicing up your presentations. However, although it has many activities like live polls and Q&As, it doesn’t have games.

I still consider it a gamified learning platform, as the leaderboards, team competitions, spinner wheels, and other aspects will gamify your lessons. However, if you’re looking for real games, like Hangman or Snakes & Ladders, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

In addition, if you’re looking for free software for your class, it’s not really a viable option. The free version only allows up to seven participants, which is too low for most teachers.

Fortunately, the Edu Lite plan only costs a few dollars a month and allows up to 25 participants. Still, it’s not entirely free, which could be an obstacle for teachers on a strict budget.