Day 10 – Bing Apps Keep You Up-To-Date
Surface RT for Teachers –Teaching and Learning with a Windows 8 Tablet
Today I want to mention a set of apps I regularly use that come preloaded on the Surface RT that I call my Bing Apps. Since this is a Microsoft tablet it is not too surprising that the default search engine is Bing and not Google, although you can still use Google.
If you have not used Bing in a while I think you will be surprised by how graphically pleasing the Bing search page has become. Every day the Bing search engine features a colorful photo from somewhere on Planet Earth. Below is an example from a couple of days ago.
This is a different than the minimalist approach that Google takes with the Google doodle on a stark white background. Some people still “Google it” but if you are using a Windows 8 tablet like the Surface RT you might want to “Bing it”, just go to http://bing.com to see the latest picture of the day.
There is much more to the Bing family than the Bing search engine on the Surface RT. The other Bing apps I regularly use are the News app, Sports app, Weather app, Finance app, and Travel app. I have arranged them on my Start Screen with the category name Bing Apps to keep them organized and easy to access.
You can easily rearrange the Live Tiles on the Start Screen and I always place my Desktop Live Tile in the lower left-side of the Start Screen on all my Windows 8 devices so it is easy to get to. I group my other Live Tiles by categories that make sense to me. For example, I have a group called Office 2013 that keeps my Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote apps together.
I think of these Bing apps as my own personal newspaper. You can add feeds to some of the apps and customize the sources that pull in information of interest to you. I do this mostly with the News app where I can add my own Technology Section from the sources I choose. In a way, this is kind of like the now defunct Google Reader.
Another benefit of the Bing apps is that some of the apps offer notifications. I sometimes get a notification popup when breaking news hits. The biggest thing to get accustomed to with these apps is that you scroll to the right to access more information. We have become so accustomed to scrolling up and down that it takes a bit of time to get used to scrolling horizontally. This actually works quite well, especially on a touchscreen like the Surface RT.
Another benefit of using the Bing apps together is that you can take advantage of “snap view” where you can park one app on one side of the screen and have another app open at the same time in the main window. Below is an example where I have the Finance app open and snapped to the right-side of the screen and in the main portion of the screen I have the Sports app open.
So, I can be reading the latest sports news in the main window and at the same time have all the market stats updated in real-time in snap view, pretty cool!
You could also have your email snapped to one side of the screen while you are doing something else with the main screen.
You could also have your email snapped to one side of the screen while you are doing something else with the main screen.
Multitasking at its best.
Until next time…
Keep on Learning,
Tom Grissom, Ph.D.
@tomgrissom
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar