Unit 1 Reflection

Ultimately, for my unit one writing project, I chose to really analyze if technology is helping the everyone learn in the classroom. From students to teachers and so on. From my analysis of my three curated sources, I can confidently say that technology is assisting us more than we ever thought it could when it comes to learning productively. Each source that I chose I wanted to make sure that it was different in terms of who was writing it, how it was created (video, journal, professional study, etc) because that would give it its most in depth analysis of how technology is improving and helping our environment. In my fourth source, Zoe Bernard spoke about a navy sergeant who believed technology bettered his education: "The Navy reported that the students who had worked with the digital tutor made enormous strides in their education, and that they consistently tested higher than students who had studied without the program's benefit." In addition, my second source is what provided the most evidence that technology was enhancing and beneficial to all types of people through their study with teachers and students in an elementary school. "Another role that emerged from the data was the use of technology to enhance communication and feedback between students, teachers, and parents. Examples of enhanced communication in this study include collaborative online work between students, online polling of students during class, and detailed analytics and progress monitoring." The advancements technology is making is truly fascinating and I am excited to see what happens in years to come with it. 

In terms of my own use of technology throughout this project, I can say that technology is really all I have used to complete the project. As I sit here in a hotel room in Raleigh, North Carolina preparing for our game against NC State, I looked around to see straight technology assisting me in pre game film, my homework, and a speaker to play good music. The internet is filled with information about technology, which I find pretty funny honestly. I have the TV on rerunning last night's NCAA games and listening to what may happen in the draft after players have been performing.  I am using technology to research about technology. Who would have ever thought? 

I feel as if the research I have is sufficient. The reason I say this is because of how many people are studying the use of technology right now, especially as it changes so rapidly in this day and age. I could probably seek more information on my now, such as athletes and their use of technology when it comes to game film, practice films, studying their opponents. Being an athlete is being a student just in another type of setting, you are learning everyday and using the same things to learn. I know the coaches are constantly on their phones and their computers, we have new apps that make us check into class when we are on campus and even an app that provides our entire schedule with when we have meetings, practice, tutors, flight, and much more. When I was being recruited, I knew to always have my phone in my hand because a coach could be calling at any second from any school in the country. Technology is a wild thing! But, now that I touch on this area of technology and sport, I am interested to see what coaches did back when we didn't have these types of benefits and how they were still successful with much less. 

I could in fact see myself using some of these sources in unit 2 and 3 because of all of the information they provided. Since we use technology to do pretty much everything, some of these statistics and findings could be useful later down the road for new projects. I like to be different and find new things, but if it came down to it and I needed a source that was reliable, I could easily go back and view these as I already have before. Since most of my sources used some type of research, with the research question being proposed next unit, I will keep these articles in the back of my head to reference or ponder when thinking of new ideas.