Day 5 – The Appification of the Surface RT Begins
Surface RT for Teachers -
Teaching and Learning with a Windows 8 Tablet
Today I begin to explore some of the apps available on the Surface RT. If you follow the marketing hype surrounded around tablets you have probably heard that the phrase “there is an app for that”.
One of the big surprises I found when I reviewed the Surface Pro was how few apps I used. This was in large part due to the Surface Pro being a x86 compatible PC and therefore I had familiar applications to choose from. Over the years I have a staple of about a dozen applications I regularly use. These select programs have been able to do everything I need to produce teaching and learning content.
With the Surface RT (the little brother to the Surface Pro) I do not have the option to run x86 programs. The Surface RT runs on the ARM architecture and is incompatible with other x86 programs. I already find this limiting as I do not have the safety blanket of x86 applications available to me. I will be finding out over the coming days if I can find acceptable substitutes to some of the applications I regularly use on a PC.
I am not sure that the appification of education is a good thing because many apps are very focused on a single purpose and many seem watered-down. This can be a good thing if you regularly do that one specific thing with the app, but much of what we do in education is inter-related. I worry that breaking things down into small apps of single purpose that we might lose the big picture.
The other disadvantage of apps is that they are constantly in need of updating. Installing an app for this and for that can quickly lead to a proliferation of apps. If you are managing apps on a large number of devices the management issues can quickly become burdensome.
I am learning a lot about my workflow since I purchased the Surface RT. Starting out with a fresh system is a great opportunity to find the apps I really need. I am starting with a clean “slate” (pardon the pun) and I can quickly find the limitations of a new blank system.
The first app I installed on the Surface RT was the Kindle app and I followed that up with the Audible app from Amazon. I mentioned in an earlier post that my wife reads a lot of ebooks on our Nexus 7 Android tablet. This works great for her but she also wanted to have access to her Kindle books on the Surface RT. It took about five minutes to download and install the Kindle app and then sign-in to our Amazon account. In five short minutes we went from no access to complete access to our entire ebook Kindle Library, magic!
I also installed the Audible app even though we do not have an Audible subscription. We do have a couple of Audible books in our library so I installed the Audible app so we could listen to them. I have noticed the option for many books on Amazon that if you buy the Kindle format you also get the option to buy the audio Audible version at a reduced cost.
We decided to use Amazon long ago because we did not want to get locked into an ecosystem like iBooks that limited device choice. You can only read the iBooks format on an iOS device. Amazon gives us the ability to read our Kindle ebooks on Android, Apple, and/or Windows devices.
Yes, it is true that Amazon uses the KF8 proprietary format but at least you can use it on the device of your choice.
So the appification of the Surface RT begins, stay tuned in the coming days as I share what other apps I discover for teaching and learning purposes.
Until next time…
Keep on Learning,
Tom Grissom, P.hD.
@tomgrissom
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar