5 Things I’ve Learned From Using Grammarly in Fully Remote Learning

1. Breakout room conferences are key. I have learned to put students in break rooms to conference with them. We can go through the Grammarly suggestions together and talk about them one-on-one, which really seems to help students feel like they are getting time with me as their teacher. Remote learning sometimes can make students feel like they are revising their writing in a vacuum, so pairing the writing assistive tool with breakout room time has been essential. Grammarly’s coordination with Google Docs allows us to look and their piece together in real-time and talk about revision.
2. “Click-through frustration” is real. With remote learning, I am often not with my students when they are working on an assignment, instead using my time with them for direct instruction and support while they work on their own for longer assignments. For this reason, students sometimes get frustrated with the inability to ask me a question right away in real-time, and instead, just click through the Grammarly “flags.” I worry about their willingness and ability to really make sense of the changes with the lack of teacher instruction.
3. Many students don’t stop to smell the flowers. When I ask students why they made or ignored certain changes in Grammarly, there seems to be a distinct lack of understanding. Many students are not actually reading the assignments, but instead just trying to get the assignment done so that they can move on to the next thing. In remote learning, since they don’t have all of their classes every day, students are often juggling all their classes at once, instead of giving dedicated class time each day to each subject. This, I feel, leads to a lack of time spend on understanding the subject matter but instead, a mentality of plowing through to get their list of work done. I worry that without reading the explanations that Grammarly provides for themselves, and without me to read it with them, students are not understanding why they are or are not making the changes.
4. The red tends to outbalance the green, creating defeatist situations. When a student is working on their own and doesn’t have me to walk through the flags that Grammarly has marked for them, some tend to feel defeated when they see multiple red marks. I have seen many of my students feel overwhelmed, and if I don’t see them in class that day, it becomes hard for me to check-in and boost their confidence on a human level. Using Grammarly in remote learning can be isolating for many students.
5. The language barrier is prominent. Grammarly’s intent is to support better writing of the English language, and when we use it in our English classes, we hope that our students are getting a better grasp of English. However, I have many ELL students in my classroom and they have been struggling due to lack of auditory and visual time with me, as well as a lack of understanding in what many of the terms mean when it comes to revision. Helping my ELL students understand the Grammarly marks on their paper has become a separate task in itself. Many students who have limited English proficiency simply do not understand what the mistake is and how to correct it. This leads to extra time spent translating and a lack of self-direction on the student’s part, a skill that is paramount in remote learning.

As mentioned before, as a writing assistive tool, Grammarly is best when paired with a teacher. However, when remote learning takes away access to my students, cuts my time with them in half, or provides a barrier to one-on-one interaction with students, it creates a situation in which students are learning simply with the writing tool. When not done in conjunction with true teaching, Grammarly can make revision isolation and overwhelming. When done in conjunction with teaching, Grammarly can provide revisions that both student and teacher can walk through together.