Submissions for the Bulldog Bulletin’s iPad Survey have closed and the results have been finalized. BHS is not perfect when it comes to iPad usage, but honestly, it was better than I expected.

Nearly 40 percent of students said that schoolwork accounted for over 70 percent of their iPad usage. We also found that 38 percent of the student body uses their iPads for school activities the most over other popular activities like social media (25%), games (12%), and streamed video like YouTube, Netflix or Hulu (11%).

However, some surveyees commented about the overwhelming distractions are in the learning environment:

– “We don’t use them very much.”

– “You need to get rid of games because most of the kids in school play games instead of schoolwork. Games are distractions.”

A majority of the surveyees were made-up of underclassmen (68%), while upperclassmen made-up only (32%). An interesting theory to this disparity is that underclassmen, less caught up in the traditional ways, use iPads more, and were more likely to take the iPad survey than upperclassmen, who do not.

One surveyee noted what they thought was a difference between underclassmen and upperclassmen regarding iPad use:

– “Underclass men tend to focus more on playing on their iPads than listening to what the teacher has to say.”

It would be fair to make the speculation that upperclassmen, having spent two or three years doing schoolwork the traditional way, would be reluctant to change over to new technologies. Personally, I find it much easier to organize worksheets and take notes, but much more difficult to write papers, documents, or spreadsheets. Google Drive on the iPads is limited, and typing is difficult and awkward.

I would also say I was surprised by the amount of schoolwork the iPads were primarily used for (38%). I do not use Snapchat, but I do believe it is a very big distraction for a lot of students, and expected social media (25%) to be a much higher percentage of the primary usage.

Finally, it looks like the MyBigCampus fiasco from early in the first semester was tackled. About 70 percent of students surveyed either regularly or occasionally used MyBigCampus.

Graphs and results of the Bulldog Bulletin Online iPad survey can be found below and also Bulldog Bulletin’s Facebook and Twitter.