Grammarly is a software is designed to help students automatically check English grammar and some errors in words and punctuation. The owner are Alex Shevchenko, Max Lytvyn, and Dmytro Lider. The use of this software is to upload the article you have written, after which it will ask your preference for the article, such as whether you want to use a professional tone or a less serious tone. After selecting it, it will start to automatically check your article according to your preferences. Then it will mark all the grammar and words and punctuation that it thinks can be improved. Now it can do plagiarism detection.
You must have an account, and you can choose to log in via email, Google or Facebook. After you have successfully registered, you will be asked if you are a student, teacher or expert. But you can choose not to answer. The data housed in Amazon Web Service in US. According to it, it can effectively help students improve their spelling, sentence and grammar learning in class. According to Grammarly itself, the user’s work will not be accessible to anyone else. But in Wikipedia it was revealed in 2018 that a Google researcher found that any website could log in to Grammarly as the user and access all of the user’s documents and data. It helps students learn more expressions by providing them with more substitutes, and therefore acts as a mediator. I think it is not pedagogical design. Because I think it’s just telling students about mistakes and in my experience, some of its advice is even wrong. Even though its system analyzes all the errors correctly, the student simply clicks on the correct answer it provides. This leads to some students mechanically choosing the “better” answer rather than learning it.
I chose this activity because a lot of what we were learning this time was about privacy issues, so I wanted to dive more deeply into some of the learning software. And this activity will help me to do that.