An Evaluation of the EdTech Tool Grammarly
Grammarly is a tool owned by Grammarly Incorporated and founded in 2009 by Alex Shevchenko, Max Lytvyn, and Dmytro Lide. As of March 2023, Grammarly announced its new CEO, Rahul Roy-Chowdhury. Rahul Roy-Chowdhury previous spent a little over 14 years working with Google and a brief tenure with Amazon. He is not recognized for having any particular political affiliations or beliefs. Grammarly’s mission is “to improve lives by improving communication”. The tool says that it uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing to check users’ grammar, spelling, punctuation, style, and tone errors. Ultimately, Grammarly suggests corrections to enhance the user’s writing. In actuality, Grammarly provides real-time writing assistance by analyzing the text that users input. However, Grammarly may not always be accurate and it is necessary that users exercise their judgment considering context when accepting or rejecting its suggestions.
When signing up for an account, the users may sign in with Google, Facebook, Apple or email. If signing up through a third party, Grammarly can access the information that you have authorized for that site. The personal data requested includes providing an email, name, password, preferred language, and reason for writing (work/school). However, only the user’s email address is required for email verification and the other information could be replaced with a pseudonym. All of the data saved on your Grammarly account is housed in San Francisco, California. Once a user deletes the documents from their account, Grammarly will remove them from their servers. The user is the owner of their writing and no one at Grammarly can edit or copy their work. Grammarly does use cookies which the company claims help provide their users with personal experiences.
I believe that Grammarly is an exceptional tool that aids in our pedagogies. Grammarly can serve as an aid in teaching writing skills by highlighting common mistakes, prompting students to revise and improve their work. As we are progressing through the digital age and more advanced technologies are being introduced, Grammarly simply acts as a proofreading device rather than one that creates content (such as ChatGPT). Therefore, users must engage in critical thinking, making the program an acceptable resource in schools. Its design is pedagogical as it offers suggestions for users to edit their writing. Grammarly does not automatically change the user’s writing, this allows the user to critically evaluate the program’s suggestions and their writing.
I am pleased to discover that the company values privacy as it does not sell their user’s data. Rather, Grammarly Incorporated successfully operates through its paid subscriptions. I have never deeply analyzed a programs privacy policy before as I always thought that it would be difficult to do and overwhelming—my experience was far from that! I guess it depends on the company as to how easily accessible and understandable their policies are but Grammarly’s were very easy to navigate. I choose this activity as it aligns with my learning goal of exploring online platforms. I know that when I become a teacher, I will need to look into privacy policies when choosing programs for my students.
References
Grammarly Inc. (2023). About Us. Grammarly. https://www.grammarly.com/about
Grammarly. (2023). Cookie policy. Grammarly. https://www.grammarly.com/cookie-policy
Hoover, B. (2023, March 21). Grammarly’s next chapter: Welcoming Rahul Roy-Chowdhury as Grammarly’s new CEO on May 1 and Noam Lovinsky as chief product officer. Grammarly Blog. https://www.grammarly.com/blog/rahul-roy-chowdhury-grammarly-ceo/
