Day 9 – The Mighty USB Port on the Surface RT
Surface RT for Teachers –
Teaching and Learning with a Windows 8 Tablet
In yesterday’s blog post you caught a glimpse of one of the best features the Surface RT offers, the mighty USB port. The Surface RT comes with a built-in USB 2.0 port located on the right-hand side of the tablet when held in the landscape position. This is a full-sized port so no extra adapters are needed, a nice bonus. Below is a picture of an inexpensive USB to SD Card reader that I often use to copy pictures from my point and shoot camera, very handy.
By the way, I use the Surface RT in the landscape position 99% of the time and I lock it into this position so the screen does not auto-rotate. This allows me to use my thumbs to swipe in from the right-side to access the Charms bar in Windows 8 very easily. It is so easy in fact that I rarely use the physical Windows button on the tablet itself. It is faster to swipe in from the right-hand side of the tablet with my thumb and select the Windows Flag icon from the Charms bar to go to the Start Screen.
By the way, I use the Surface RT in the landscape position 99% of the time and I lock it into this position so the screen does not auto-rotate. This allows me to use my thumbs to swipe in from the right-side to access the Charms bar in Windows 8 very easily. It is so easy in fact that I rarely use the physical Windows button on the tablet itself. It is faster to swipe in from the right-hand side of the tablet with my thumb and select the Windows Flag icon from the Charms bar to go to the Start Screen.
Have I mentioned the Surface RT can multitask?
I often use my left thumb to swipe in from the left when I have multiple apps open. By swiping in my left thumb, over and over again, I can very quickly cycle through all my open apps. This is kind of like using Alt-Tab on the keyboard but it is much faster.
Meanwhile back to the USB port, I was not sure how much I would use the USB port on the RT because it has the ARM processor that is not compatible with x86 programs. I have been pleasantly surprised by how many devices the Arm-based Surface RT can access out of the box.
Yesterday, I plugged in my Canon S100 camera into the USB port and the RT recognized it immediately and I was able to go to the Desktop File Manager and access my files directly from the Camera. Below is a picture of the camera connected to the USB port on the Surface RT.
I also have a USB to SD card reader that allows me to read SD cards from cameras directly into the Surface RT, here is another view with it plugged in to the RT.
I can also use the Arc Mouse wireless transceiver to connect the Arc Mouse wirelessly to the Surface RT. This is very nice when using Microsoft Word when you need a bit more fine motor control.
Or, if you think the Surface RT keyboard is too small, or if you do not like an onscreen keyboard, just plug-in a full sized USB Keyboard to the USB port and use it.
If you find the wired keyboard a little too limiting then you can plug-in a wireless keyboard like the Logitech K400 and use it to walk around the room while you have the Surface RT plugged into a projector or HDTV via the RTs micro-HDMI port!
How’s that for versatility?
Of course, USB drives are meant for saving and storing files. I often copy very large MP4 files that I create on another machine to a USB thumb drive for sharing on other computers. The good news is that I can plug in the USB thumb drive and watch a MP4 video files directly off the thumb drive on the Surface RT. No need to upload and then download the content to SkyDrive, DropBox, Box, or some other cloud service.
Watching videos off of the USB drive is also much, much faster and keeps A LOT of unnecessary traffic off of the network. You also do not need to worry about the video stuttering as it “buffers” over a slow and congested network connection.
You might not think that this is a big deal but think about how much traffic is created by having students watch flipped learning videos. If you assign videos for homework some students will not have access to broadband Internet at home, but a simple inexpensive USB drive can contain Gigabytes of learning material.
It is also very common for our college students to have a data plan that is capped at 5GB per month so watching videos over a capped data plan can get very expensive quickly if a student goes over their data plan cap. In reality 5GB is not very much video content at all.
So, something as simple as a USB port can dramatically impact the way you use a device in the classroom and at home.
Until next time…
Keep on Learning,
Tom Grissom, Ph.D.
@tomgrissom
http://eiu.edu/itc/
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