JAYMIE GOBEILLE'S E-PORTFOLIO

When I first found out we had to write an inquiry essay I didn’t really think much of it. Then when I found out it had to be a 2000 word digital essay I started to dread it. The first thing we had to do was come up with a broad topic, not a specific question yet, but just a general topic that we thought was interesting. I think this part of the process was actually the hardest part. So I started to think “what is something you’re interested in?” “What is something you’ve always wondered?” and lastly (and most importantly) “What is a topic that won’t take much work finding enough research on?” Long story short I came up with the inquiry question “How does the media affect body image and behaviors?” The next part of this process was to type up a blog post explaining our inquiry topic, why we chose it, and what we thought was interesting about. Next we had to actually start researching our topic and see what kind of information we could find about it. This was the easy part. I found a ton of information on my topic and it seemed as if many others out in the world were interested in it as well. I found information of body image, different types of eating disorders etc. This brings us to blog post five. Blog post five required us to talk about what we’ve been finding during our research so far. We had to talk about what we found interesting or things that were constantly being brought up about our topic. As a part of blog post five we set up a research subpage that basically just laid out our research so far and allowed us to keep all of our thoughts together on one page. Once we had been working on our research for a few weeks it was time for topic presentations. This is the part where we presented our topics and research in front of the class in hopes of gaining some constructive feedback. I ended up getting some good suggestions on how to expand my topic and make my paper more interesting. To be honest I didn’t really use many of these suggestions because I already pretty much knew where I was going with my research and how I wanted my digital essay to look. Fast forward about two weeks to our first draft being due. I was so scared to have people read my essay because I wasn’t sure if it was even interesting at all. For our first draft we had two other people sitting at our table read through our essay and then jot down some comments. I found this part a lot more helpful than the original topic presentation because I was able to get feedback that was more personal and detailed. After looking through all the comments I received I went back and revised my final draft according to some of the suggestions. This now leads us to the digital aspect of my final essay. Going into it I was like this is going to be so easy I’ll just add in a few videos and pictures and maybe even a little background music to entertain the reader as they go along…. I was so wrong. The digital portion of the essay was probably the most frustrating part of this whole process. It took me forever to find videos and pictures that I thought would add a little something to my essay. All the videos I looked at either had a bunch of random interviews in them, or were just extremely boring. I wanted something short and simple that gave whoever was watching it a good feel of what my actual essay was going to be about. Eventually I came across the video that I have at the top of my digital essay now and I thought it was perfect. It was short and straight to the point which I liked. As for the other pictures I used, most of them were just pictures of something I talked about in my essay and a few were just random pictures that I thought helped me get my point across. Once I was able to pick out pictures and videos for my essay everything started to fall into place and I really like how it all turned out.The process for this digital essay was probably one of the most frustrating things ever, but I actually really enjoyed putting it all together. I liked my topic so that made things a little easier. After being in school for so long, writing a typical research paper has gotten pretty old so it was nice to be able to do something creative and different for a change. I hope you enjoy reading my digital inquiry essay as much as I enjoyed creating it.

Click to see final digital essay