As a unique and groundbreaking service, one of Brazil’s largest educational companies, SOMOS Educação, is offering AI tools for teachers and students through its Plurall platform.
This includes Plu, the intelligent assistant developed in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to support teachers with lesson plans that optimize their time.
Plu will be implemented as a pilot and represents the first of several company projects leveraging AWS’s generative AI tools, aiming to reach over 7,000 schools in Brazil.
On average, teachers spend two hours a day preparing a class, a routine that could soon change for many educators in Brazil with the help of an intelligent AI assistant capable of generating a detailed plan for a 50-minute lesson with just a request. This assistant, Plurall AI—known as Plu—is a generative AI tool created by one of Brazil’s largest educational companies, SOMOS Educação, in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), designed to help teachers and students plan lessons more quickly, accurately, and effectively.
At Bett Brasil 2024, the country’s premier educational fair, SOMOS Educação chose to unveil the pilot for this virtual assistant, capable of delivering a complete lesson script to a teacher in just seconds. Not only does it provide a detailed lesson plan, but it also includes illustrations, suggested activities for students, and even customized questions for students who need exams tailored to lower difficulty levels.
SOMOS Educação aims to revolutionize primary education in Brazil by reaching over 5,000 schools with the intelligent assistant Plu by 2025. The main goal of this technology is to enable teachers to dedicate more of their work hours to personalized student engagement. According to the OECD’s 2018 Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) and McKinsey’s 2020 report, 67% of teachers’ time is spent on activities outside the classroom, such as lesson preparation. McKinsey estimates that 20% to 40% of these activities could be optimized with technology, which could provide professionals with up to 12 extra days of productivity annually for each 5% optimization. “We believe this technology can be incredibly valuable in freeing them from time-consuming tasks. If we consider a conservative optimization goal of 10%, it could mean nearly 24 additional days per year for teachers to support students, enhance lessons, or focus on their own well-being. These metrics may change over time and could lead to other measurable impacts,” explains Rafael Augusto Teixeira, Senior Computing Manager at SOMOS Educação.
“Generative AI is one of the most transformative technologies of our generation. It addresses some of humanity’s toughest challenges, enhancing human performance and maximizing productivity. (…) In education, AI has a significant impact, offering several advantages that can transform how we learn and teach,” states Cleber Morais, AWS Director of Enterprise Sales for Latin America
Successful Outcomes
For nearly a century, SOMOS Educação, a leader in primary and secondary education in Brazil, has been providing comprehensive services for schools, including educational tools and online learning resources. Since 2014, its digital platform, Plurall, has served over 7 million students and 120,000 teachers across 7,000 schools, offering digital books, activities, assessments, and other online tools to this community.
Aware that AI is here to stay and holds great potential to transform the educational landscape, SOMOS Educação approached the AWS team in June 2023 with the goal of launching a GenAI-based solution to impact the education market. “After collaborative efforts between AWS and SOMOS Educação teams, the virtual assistant for teachers was selected as the project to invest in, given its potential for scalable adoption,” explains Morais.
Thus, within its digital platform Plurall, the education company integrated this generative AI-based chatbot to provide advanced, personalized solutions. “Plu uses our extensive content base to generate responses and meet user requests, including creating complete lesson plans, text summaries, activity lists, illustrative images, unique questions, comprehensive exams, interdisciplinary lessons, bilingual content, and adjustments to the complexity level of certain topics,” Teixeira elaborates.
The intelligent assistant Plu is available to both teachers and students. For students, it can analyze content, generate questions, request summaries, provide additional activities, and even create study plans, among many other applications. For teachers, through the Adaptive Teaching tool, it can recommend new content and skills for students to work on. By July 2024, 3,400 students from various schools had been testing the assistant.
“Not only have school owners and administrators highlighted the platform’s positive outcomes, but teachers and coordinators have also praised it. The reception has been so enthusiastic that we created a waitlist for the pilot. Teachers with decades of experience have noted that the tool provides new perspectives, enhances class preparation, and supports blackboard summaries,” Teixeira states.
AWS Generative AI
To create the intelligent assistant Plu, SOMOS Educação utilized Amazon Bedrock, a cloud service platform from Amazon Web Services (AWS) that enables developers and companies to build, train, and deploy AI models tailored to a variety of specific tasks. By using prompts—tools to guide and customize responses—the developers adapted the behavior of these pre-trained models to meet the unique needs of the educational context. This customization improved the chat applications used by teachers and students, ensuring more precise and relevant responses to school-related requests.
Among the AWS tools used in the development of Plu were CloudFront for front-end content caching and RDS for managing school users and data. Other critical services included Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service), which facilitates cloud application management and ensures the assistant operates efficiently and without interruptions; Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), providing secure and scalable cloud storage for quick access to essential information; Amazon OpenSearch Service, enabling fast and accurate data searches and analysis, ensuring teachers quickly access needed information; Amazon SQS, supporting message exchanges between different system components for smooth chatbot communication; and finally, Amazon SNS, which allows for efficient notification distribution to teachers and students, enhancing overall service communication and coordination.
AWS’s executive for Latin America noted that the company collaborated with Accenture in designing the GenAI model architecture for the virtual assistant, as well as in the development, implementation, and training of SOMOS Educação’s teams. “AWS offers companies more than just a chatbot, tool, or LLM: we provide multiple capabilities, including generative AI-powered applications, tools for creating custom generative AI applications, and scalable infrastructure. All with security safeguards and controls, allowing companies to operate with confidence. In the near future, all applications will feature generative AI to make them more useful, personal, and engaging,” says Morais.
One of the strengths of SOMOS Educação’s intelligent assistant is the company’s extensive educational content database—one of the largest globally by volume—which serves as the assistant’s foundational knowledge. To manage this resource, SOMOS relied on guidance from AWS Brazil and employed the RAG (Retrieve, Augment, Generate) approach, a method that supports AI—especially in language and text generation models—to enhance the quality and relevance of responses generated by AI systems like this chatbot.
“We believe that SOMOS’s vast AI-driven knowledge base can rapidly drive changes in the learning process, not only in Brazil but globally. This technology can be easily adapted to other languages and content bases, thanks to the power of AI,” states Teixeira.
New Tools
Currently, the implementation of generative AI through this virtual assistant represents SOMOS Educação’s cutting-edge offering in education. In fact, the company has established a long-term roadmap to integrate generative AI across the entire platform, explains Bruno Brusco, the digital director responsible for the entire Plurall platform operation.
In the first phase, the focus will be on enhancing teacher productivity through AI usage. In the second, specific support will be provided to both teachers and students through the creation of adaptive learning pathways, which students can use for personalized assignments or in learning games and challenges assigned by tutors. In the third phase, SOMOS aims to leverage AI-generated data for two key purposes: predicting students’ academic performance and providing insights to assist administrators in making informed decisions. This will involve detailed information on improvement areas, identified educational trends, and strategic recommendations to enhance student performance and educational management efficiency.
“We have the best educational content in Brazil, and combined with our strong investment in technology, this positions us as leaders in large-scale AI initiatives for education,” states Brusco.
