A survey was sent out to two English classes in order to look at how much time students are actually spending on their iPad not only doing school work, but also gaming at school and at home. The purpose of this survey was to really look at how much time was spent gaming instead of actually working on and using their iPads in a useful manner. Some of the results were quite shocking and they up a certain question. Are iPads really an effective tool for learning?

The students from both classes admitted to spending, on average, 14.2 hours gaming on their iPads alone and 26 hours total per week. One student from the first class claimed to spend 25 hours just gaming per week, while another student allegedly spent 50 hours total on their iPad per week. The second class gave usable feedback in the section that asked about how many hours they spend gaming while class is in session, the results were 2.2 hours gaming during classes. That’s well over an entire class period which is quite ridiculous, in my personal opinion. Anyways, these results don’t really prove the iPad as being an effective tool for learning as half of the time spent on them is used for gaming. Perhaps the school actually needs to completely block the AppStore and push each individual the apps that they need for each of their classes, load some more proxies onto our iPad, or find out a way to limit the time that students can play games.

Based on these statistics the school should really take another look into how useful the iPads really are because these results beg to differ on their effectiveness as a tool to learn, and how to make them increasingly more effective. Hopefully in the upcoming years at Manitou High we will see improvements on how beneficial the iPads are to each individual student and perhaps see an increase on how well the iPads help students learn.

By Chase Howard