Unit 2 Reflection

To begin, I didn’t have to think too much about who my audience would be for this piece. This is because my topic, which focuses on the use of digital tools in the classroom, already zooms into a specific age group: students. Now, I could have chosen to focus on younger students, or older students, who potentially were in college or grad school, and I chose older students because I thought I would be able to find more rich content there. Secondly, I thought I could apply this topic to myself and my surroundings, like my friends, people in my class and more, which would make it easier for me to write this research paper and understand it better, which it did. Lastly, I chose this audience because it was the most relatable to me, so it automatically interested me more. So, once I chose this audience, I thought that the best way to reach it was by directly engaging with it face-to-face, hence why I chose to interview people for my pitch. It was definitely more helpful to experience asking questions and seeing my respondents’ reactions in real life, because it was so much more than just asking them over text or online. I was able to capture their facial expressions, their tone of voice and emotions better. Plus, they were more willing to explain their reasoning behind their answers, etc. because I was able to form conversation with them.

In researching this piece, I challenged myself by using sources that I wasn’t used to. In the past, I’ve only used websites or books to find evidence, but in this piece, I used a YouTube video for the first time, which was very different, but manageable in my opinion. In my thesis, I wrote about how, although it’s beneficial to a certain extent, there are negative outcomes of using technology in the classroom, which I think could be controversial within this topic. I think this because as technology is evolving, there is only more and more uses for it that people might use and grow fond of, and students are only using technology more than ever before.

Compared to the last unit, my thoughts on this topic changed to some extent. Before, I thought that the use of technology to study and take notes was only hurting students. I thought that it wasn’t an effective way to learn and that it had many physical and mental effects on students. However, as I did more research, I found out that there wasn’t a direct relationship between fatigue, headaches, eye strains and technology. These physical effects only happened because students were focused and it caused them to blink less, irritate the eye and more. Additionally, I realized that using digital devices to learn can have a lot more benefits than what I initially thought. It is much more convenient, portable and easier to use, as well as resources being more accessible, spelling and grammar checks. Tools like these can help students, so I focused on the argument that using primarily electronic devices can hurt students’ education, which I think is a more specific and arguable claim.

I was successful in engaging my audience with my pitch because it involved asking and interviewing them one-on-one. I received a lot of feedback and information to work with, and I kept referring back to it throughout the research portion of my research paper. I was able to see students’ perspectives on the issue and tied that into my paper.

While doing research for this paper, I learned a lot of new things that could be applied to my everyday life. For example, I didn’t know about how the eye can get irritated whenever it focuses on something for too long, and that it needs a break. I never took too much regard to this, I would look at my laptop screen for prolonged periods of time, and the only breaks I would give myself would be with my phone, which doesn’t really give my eye a break. However, I plan on changing the way I study with my digital devices and try to use more handwriting as well.