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Unit 2 Reflection


1
Choosing the audience for this piece was part of the process of determining my topic. Once I had decided to focus on the role of technology in the classroom, it was fairly clear that school administrators were the proper target audience, because they are the ones who make decisions regarding curriculums and educational philosophy.

In terms of rhetorical choices that I made to specifically tailor my piece to my target audience, I chose to follow a pretty standard research report format with main point bolded as section headers followed by narrative below explaining the point. I made this choice because this format is common in academia and school administrators are likely very familiar and comfortable with it.

I also consulted articles and studies that focused on the opinions of other people within academia because I know that there is nothin academics love more than to listen to the opinions of other academics.

2
"The conversation" surrounding the role of technology in the classroom is primarily contained to the academic community but there are some exceptions. For the most part, education trade-press was the primary source of discussion regarding how technology can be most effectively used in the classroom. This makes sense because curriculum reform, even when it has to do with trendy subject matter such as technology, is generally thought of as an extremely boring topic.

Additionally, there have been several academic and professional studies/surveys conducted regarding technology and its place in education. These were highly beneficial to me in writing this piece as they provided concrete data to work with rather than simply opinion.

The only primary research I conducted for this project were the 3 questions that I sent out as part of the Research Questions blog post. These questions did a good job guiding my research and helped me greatly in terms of staying focused on the topic at hand in such an open ended project. I chose not to include the responses to my research questions in my piece because they are purely based on the opinions of an extremely small and non diverse group of people.

3 
I was unsuccessful in engaging with my target audience for this project. Since teachers are very busy during the school year and I either have never met or haven't spoken with them since I was a kid it doesn't surprise me that the people I chose to send my pitch to didn't respond. My method of communication with them was email, which is very easy to miss or ignore.

4
Research planning and design are skills that apply in many different fields, but particularly in my major of Advertising. The skills I practiced during this project are directly applicable to things that I am working on in one of my Advertising classes this semester. Learning to take the ideas from several different sources, synthesize them down to their essential meanings and then combine it all into a coherent narrative is .very difficult and simply the experience of practicing it will undoubtedly make me better prepared to conduct a project like this in  the future.

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