How to make lecture slides from your readings

By Ekrem Çetinkaya · Published 8 September 2026 · Türkçesi

To make lecture slides from your readings, start from the sources rather than from a blank slide: pick two or three texts per session, extract the claims you want students to leave with, outline the session around those claims, then write one slide per claim with the source named on it. Notes, practice questions and the handout come from the same list afterwards.

This guide is written for university instructors and anyone who teaches from assigned reading. It describes the workflow first and the tools second, because the workflow is what makes a deck defensible when a student asks "where does this come from?".

Why start from the readings and not from last year's deck?

A deck that was written from memory drifts. Each term a slide gets simplified, a caveat disappears, a number is rounded, and after three years nobody can say which chapter a claim came from. Starting from the readings each time you touch a session keeps the deck anchored: every slide has a source, and when the source changes (a new edition, a replaced paper) you know exactly which slides to revisit.

It is also faster than it sounds. Most of the work of a lecture is deciding what to leave out. Reading with the deck in mind makes that decision explicit.

Step 1: choose the sources for one session

Limit yourself. A 90-minute session rarely needs more than:

• one primary text (the chapter or paper the session is "about"),
• one or two supporting texts (a contrasting view, a worked example, a lab handout),
• your own material from earlier weeks, if the session builds on it.

Put them in one place per session. If you keep a folder per week with a sources subfolder, the deck, the notes and the handout all sit next to the texts they came from. Lecture Studio uses exactly this layout: a course is a folder of units, each unit has its own sources, and the course and the whole library can have shared sources on top.

Step 2: extract claims, not summaries

Read each source with one question: what should a student be able to say after this session that they could not say before? Write those as short declarative sentences, one per line, with the source and location next to each:

A process is in exactly one of five states at any time.        os-book, 3.1
A context switch is pure overhead; nothing useful runs.          os-book, 3.2.3
The lab scheduler starves low-priority jobs under load.          lab-03, task 2

Twelve to twenty claims is typical for a session. If you have forty, you have two sessions. If you have five, the readings are thin or the session is a discussion, not a lecture.

Step 3: outline the session around the claims

Order the claims so that each one is understandable given the ones before it. Group them into three to six sections. Give each section a title that is itself a claim or a question, not a topic label: "Why context switches are expensive" teaches more than "Context switching".

At this point you have an outline that already cites its sources, before a single slide exists. This is the artefact worth keeping; the deck is derived from it.

Step 4: write one slide per claim

A slide carries one claim, the minimum evidence for it, and the source. Practical rules that survive contact with a lecture hall:

1. Title is the claim. A student who reads only titles should get the argument.
2. Three to five lines of body. If you need more, the claim is two claims.
3. Source on the slide. A short reference in the footer: Silberschatz 3.2.3. Full references go on the last slide or in the handout.
4. Diagrams are drawn, not pasted. A figure lifted from the book is usually too dense for a room; redraw the part that supports the claim.
5. No slide without a purpose. Section dividers are fine; "any questions?" slides are not.

If you write decks in Markdown with Marp, each slide is a few lines of text and the deck lives in a plain file you can diff and version. That is what Lecture Studio produces: a Marp Markdown deck, slide by slide, with the citations to the sources you attached.

Step 5: check the deck against the sources

Before the notes, before the design pass, read the deck once with the sources open and ask of every slide: is that what the source says, and is the reference right? This is the step most people skip, and it is the step that catches the rounded number and the lost caveat.

Two mechanical checks help: overflowing slides (text that will not fit at the font size you present at), and images that are referenced but missing. Lecture Studio's preview flags both while you edit.

Step 6: add the notes, the questions and the handout from the same claims

Once the deck holds, the other artefacts are cheap because the claim list already exists:

• Speaker notes: for each slide, what you will say that is not on the slide, and the one thing you must not forget. See speaker notes in Marp for how to write them into the deck itself.
• Practice questions: one or two per claim, written so that the source answers them.
• Instructor guide: timing per section, where students usually get lost, what to skip when you are running late.

Doing these from the claim list rather than from the finished slides keeps them consistent with each other and with the readings.

Where the assistant fits

Every step above can be done by hand. What an assistant does well is the mechanical part: reading the sources you give it, proposing the claim list with locations, drafting the slides from the outline, and writing notes and questions from the same claims. What it must not do is invent a claim the sources do not contain, and that is the property to check for in any tool: does the output name the source for each slide, and can you open that source in the same place?

Lecture Studio is built around this workflow: the sources sit next to the deck, the assistant cites them, and the result is a Marp Markdown file you own. It runs on macOS and needs an Oberik project key for the assistant.

FAQ

How many slides should a 90-minute lecture have?

Count claims, not minutes. Twelve to twenty claims with one slide each, plus section dividers and a summary, lands between twenty and thirty slides for most subjects. Denser subjects run more slides with less on each.

Should I cite sources on every slide?

Yes, with a short reference in the footer, and a full reference list on the last slide or in the handout. Students see where the material comes from and you can rebuild the deck when a source changes.

What if my readings disagree with each other?

Make the disagreement a claim: "Source A predicts X, source B measures Y." A lecture that shows students where the field is unsettled is more honest and more memorable than one that picks a side silently.

Can I do this with PowerPoint or Google Slides?

The workflow does not depend on the tool. Markdown decks make the claim list and the deck the same file, which is why this guide uses Marp, but the steps are the same in any editor.