Industry Served: EdTech
EduSmart Planner, An AIpowered Curriculum & Lesson Planning Platform for CJ Fallon
250+ Schools, 4,500+ Teachers, 75% Less Time on Administration, Streamlining Curriculum Management and Plan Creation with AI
Giving Teachers Back the Time They Were Spending on Admin
Discuss your projectCJ Fallon is one of Ireland's most prominent educational publishers, producing curriculum-aligned content for Irish primary and secondary schools. As a publisher deeply embedded in the daily practice of Irish teaching, CJ Fallon recognised a persistent problem: teachers were spending significant time on administrative planning tasks that could be structured, automated and simplified with the right tools.
Creating long-term and short-term lesson plans, managing Cuntais Mhiosúla, organising teaching resources and tracking plan completion across a school were all processes happening largely outside any unified system. Schools lacked visibility. Teachers carried the burden of repetitive planning work. And there was no central platform connecting the publisher's curriculum content to the teacher's daily planning process.
We worked closely with CJ Fallon to build EduSmart Planner: a web platform that centralises curriculum management, automates lesson plan generation using AI, and provides schools with real-time visibility into teaching progress across their staff.
Project Challenges & Needs
Automating Curriculum Extraction From PDFs
Curriculum documents arrive as PDFs. Extracting structured, month-wise content from those documents and turning it into usable lesson plan components required AI-powered OCR and document parsing accurate enough for educational use without manual correction at every step.
AI Plan And Quiz Generation At Scale
Teachers needed to generate structured lesson plans and personalised quizzes from curriculum content without writing every element from scratch. The platform required an AI layer capable of producing coherent, curriculumaligned outputs based on subject, class level and topic at the click of a button.
Real-Time Plan Tracking Across A School
School administrators needed live visibility into which teachers had completed their plans, which were outstanding and how progress tracked against the academic calendar. Updating thousands of plan statuses in real time across a growing number of schools required serious backend optimisation.
Multi-School Management With Personalised Experiences
Teachers often work across more than one school. The platform needed to allow a single teacher to manage plans and resources across multiple school assignments without confusion, while each school retained its own distinct data, settings and access controls.
Sensitive School Data Security
School data carries significant sensitivity: teacher records, student information, curriculum materials and institutional planning documents. The platform required robust encryption, secure authentication and data protection measures appropriate for an educational institution from day one.
Accessibility Across Large Data Volumes
Schools and teachers managing dozens of classes, hundreds of plans and large resource libraries needed interfaces that made navigation through high volumes of data feel simple. The UX had to work for educators with no technical background, on whatever device they happened to be using.
Our Solution
We built EduSmart Planner as a web-based platform with three distinct interfaces, delivering:
The platform was designed through three phases: a UI/UX design phase focused on accessibility and data navigation for non-technical users; a development phase integrating the AI models and backend systems for real-time updates; and a quality assurance phase combining automated testing with direct user feedback to refine the platform before launch.
Interfaces We Developed
Admin Interface (CJ Fallon)
The top-level management layer for CJ Fallon's team:
- School and teacher account management: add, edit and manage all organisations & their staff on the platform
- Centralised resource management: upload and distribute study materials to schools and teachers
- Content categorisation management for curriculum structure and subject organisation
- Curriculum PDF upload with AI-driven automatic extraction and month-wise plan generation
- Platform-wide plan and progress monitoring with completion rate dashboards
School Interface
Used by school administrators to manage their teaching staff and plan visibility:
- Teacher registration and account management within the school
- Real-time plan tracking: monitor completion status for each teacher across the academic year
- Leave and holiday management: plan school breaks and track teacher scheduling
- Plan assignment: assign long-term and short-term plans to specific teachers
- Resource sharing: upload and distribute study materials directly to the school's teaching staff
- Completion rate insights and engagement reports across the school
Teacher Interface
The daily planning tool used by classroom teachers:
- Dashboard: clear overview of assigned plans, upcoming tasks and progress status
- Short-term plans: weekly and fortnightly planning with customisable content
- AI Smart Plans: generate a structured lesson plan with a single prompt using ChatGPTpowered suggestions
- Resource library: access and download materials shared by the school or CJ Fallon admin
- Multi-school switching: manage teaching responsibilities across different school assignments in one account
- Long-term plan creation: structured annual planning aligned to the extracted curriculum
- Cuntais Mhiosúla: monthly plan creation to the Irish primary curriculum format
- AI quiz generation: create curriculum-aligned quizzes from a specified topic or learning objective
- Homework tracking: assign, manage and review student homework within the platform
Key Features & Capabilities
AI Curriculum Extraction
Admins upload a curriculum PDF and the platform extracts the content automatically using Eden AI's OCR and document parsing, categorising it month by month. The output feeds directly into the plan generation tools, removing the manual transcription step that previously consumed significant admin time.
AI-Powered Lesson Plans
Teachers generate structured lesson plans from a natural language prompt, with ChatGPT producing content aligned to the uploaded curriculum. Plans can be edited, customised and saved within the teacher's account. The AI handles the structure; the teacher focuses on the teaching.
Personalised Quiz Generation
Teachers specify a topic, class level and learning criteria, and the platform generates a quiz using AI. Questions are curriculum-aligned and ready to use without manual editing, cutting quiz creation from a lengthy task to a one-click operation.
Real-Time Plan Progress Tracking
School administrators see completion status for every assigned plan across their teaching staff, updated in real time. Outstanding plans, completed plans and inprogress work are all visible from the school dashboard without needing to contact individual teachers for updates.
Cuntais Mhiosúla Support
Monthly planning to the Cuntais Mhiosúla format is built into the teacher interface, structured to the specific requirements of the Irish primary curriculum. Teachers complete and submit monthly plans within the same workflow they use for all other planning, with no separate tool required.
Multi-School Teacher Access
Teachers working across more than one school switch between assignments from within the same account. Each school's plans, resources and homework appear in the correct context, and the teacher's identity and qualifications carry across all assignments without duplicate registration.
Outcomes And Impact
250+ Schools, 4,500+ Teachers
Scale
EduSmart Planner is live across more than 250 schools in Ireland, with over 4,500 teachers benefitting from automated plan creation since launch.
75% Time Saved In Administration
Efficiency
Schools using the platform report 75% less time spent on curriculum and plan management time returned to teachers for teaching rather than paperwork.
Overwhelmingly Positive Educator Feedback
Reception
The platform has received positive feedback from educators, with curriculum management and AI plan generation cited as the highest-impact improvements.
Technologies Used To Develop The Solution
Frontend
Nuxt 3 (Vue 3 / TypeScript)
Server-rendered web app with fast page loads and a consistent, accessible interface across all three user roles.
UI Framework
Bootstrap 5
Responsive layouts and pre-built UI components enabling fast development of consistent, accessible interfaces for large data volumes.
Backend
AdonisJS 5
Scalable backend framework handling routing, validation, authentication and all business logic for schools, teachers and admin.
Database
PostgreSQL
Structured storage for school records, teacher accounts, plans, resources, curriculum content and progress data with strong data integrity.
AI Plan Generation
ChatGPT (OpenAI)
Natural language lesson plan and quiz generation from curriculum content, producing structured, editable outputs at the teacher's request.
Document Parsing
Eden AI
OCR and document parsing APIs used to extract and categorise curriculum content from uploaded PDFs automatically
Hosting
Azure (Virtual Machine)
Backend and frontend deployed on Azure cloud infrastructure, providing reliable, scalable hosting for a growing network of schools.
Authentication
JWT And Bcrypt
Stateless authentication with JSON Web Tokens and secure password hashing with Bcrypt, ensuring safe access for all user roles.
Security
Encryption And RBAC
Data encrypted at rest and in transit, with role-based access controls separating admin, school and teacher permissions throughout the platform.
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