Software that handles the mechanics without taking over the thinking.
Shavaju builds tools and practice for work where a machine can take care of the mechanics, but the judgment and the words should stay the person’s own.
Today that means English word-usage practice, free for schools to use, and the word-detection project it grew out of.
What we’re building
English word-usage practice, open to try.
The activity at learn.shavaju.com is a public prototype. It is there to be tried and reacted to. It is not a finished classroom lesson, and it is not the form a school would eventually receive.
- Read
- Judge
- Choose
- Read why
You read a sentence and judge whether it needs a change. Some sentences are already correct, so the answer is sometimes that nothing is wrong. Where there is a problem, you find the word, choose what should replace it, and then read the explanation.
Not every question runs through every step. Picking the wrong word can end an item there, with the explanation.
Every question in the prototype is an unreviewed draft.
Privacy. No account is needed. The activity sets no cookies and keeps answers only in memory while the page is open; its code does not send them anywhere. No generative AI runs in the activity. Hosting infrastructure may process request information, such as IP addresses.
It started with confused words.
Confusables began with a narrower question: how can technology detect a confused word while preserving the rest of what someone wrote?
Its approach favors restraint, explainable rules, and preserving authorship. That work led to another question: instead of only detecting a mistake, could we help people learn to recognize it themselves?
That question became the practice activity.
For schools
Free for schools to use.
There is no licence fee and no subscription for a school’s use of the core resource, and the intention is to keep it that way.
That covers finishing the core practice, building more exercises within it, considering additional confused words that educators suggest, keeping the resource maintained, and making the changes needed to keep it compatible with a school’s normal technical, security, privacy and accessibility requirements for student use.
Custom integrations, administrative systems, or development substantially beyond the practice itself are not part of that, and would be a separate conversation.
The intention is for a participating school to run the resource in its own environment, in a format agreed with that school. Nothing is packaged for any particular system yet, and there is no LMS, SCORM or LTI integration today.
Our thinking
Getting the answer isn’t the same as knowing how.
Technology can help us write, calculate, code, research, and solve problems faster than ever.
That’s useful.
But some abilities are worth keeping.
So a practice activity should hold on to the reasoning it is meant to develop. If the software does the deciding, the deciding is what the learner stops practising.
Technology should make people more capable, not less.
Beyond the first subject
The subject can change. The principle doesn’t.
Today we’re starting with English word usage.
Tomorrow, the same question could apply somewhere else: What should a person still know how to do for themselves?
Shavaju is being built around that question.
Machines will keep getting more capable. So should we.
Think first. Understand why. Use technology second.