Day 25–A Fun day exploring the Play To feature from a Windows 8 Tablet to a Xbox 360
A Windows 8 Tablet for Teaching and Learning - Day 25Saturday, December 29, 2012
Part of the fun during the holidays is getting new gifts and being a little self-indulgent. Today is one of those days for me as I have been setting up a new Xbox 360. Those of us with older children will understand that a few of the family gadgets have a way of wandering out of the household once a son or daughter goes off to college or leaves the nest. Such was the case with “our” former Xbox.
So, today I purchased a new Xbox 360 to catch up on what all the youngins’ are doing. Since I am conducting “research” I needed to have the hardware to test some of the new features of Windows 8 both on Tablets and on PC’s.
The biggest useful feature for educators on the Xbox 360 is the new “Play To” feature that allows you to wirelessly share media content (music and videos) to the big screen.
I have only had my Xbox connected for a couple of hours so I am still trying to figure things out but “Play To” is very easy to use. I already have it working with my new Xbox connected to the HDTV. I am connected wirelessly to my home network with my tablet and also wirelessly to the Xbox. You must be on the same wireless subnet for the “Play To” feature to work.
I connected the Xbox 360 to my HDTV with a HDMI cable so both the video and the audio are carried by one HDMI cable out of the Xbox and into the HDTV. I opened up one of my TechTalk4Teachers podcast episodes on my Samsung Ativ 500T Tablet that is running Windows 8 and began to play the podcast on the tablet. I next swiped in with my right thumb to bring up the CHARMS bar and selected DEVICES. One of the choices under DEVICES was XBOX. When I selected XBOX the audio and video from my tablet was transferred to the HDTV and begin to play. I could still use my tablet to pause, rewind, and play the audio but the output was going to the HDTV. Pretty Cool!
I can think of all kinds of educational uses for the Play To feature. If you have a Xbox connected to a projector or HDTV in the front of the room you can easily share media to the big screen from yours, or your students, Windows 8 tablet. This is somewhat similar to airplay but only works with media, you cannot mirror the screen to the Xbox, yet.
All in all not a bad setup for a couple hours of time with a new Xbox and Windows 8 tablet. It looks pretty amazing seeing the screen from an 11.6 inch tablet up on a large screen HDTV. And the sound, the sound is phenomenal if you have a good set of stereo speakers as is common with many home theater setups.
Now I need to get to work on creating some videos to share some of the things I have been learning about how Windows 8 and the new Windows 8 Tablets benefit teachers and students. Once I have the videos on my Tablet I can use “Play To” for displaying on the big screen. Who brought the popcorn?
Keep on Learning,
Dr. Grissom
Tom Grissom, Ph.D.Dr. Grissom
http://eiu.edu/itc/
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