Day 12 - Microsoft Word on the Surface RT for Teachers – This Changes Everything

Surface RT for Teachers -
Teaching and Learning with a Windows 8 Tablet

Yesterday I explained some of the features of the Surface RT that makes it different from every other tablet currently on the market. The Surface RT is a new and innovative hybrid product that the mass market has yet to fully understand. It has a mixture of PC features like a USB port, microHDMI, and SD Card reader that gives complete flexibility for moving and sharing content.

The Surface RT also offers inking capabilities that teachers will want to explore for annotating a students digital work and also offers the real possibility of going paperless in the classroom. You can easily annotate documents using the inking tools built into Word 2013. Below is a screenshot of a Word 2013 document that I marked up to demonstrate the capability of grading student papers using the inking capability within Word 2013 on the Surface RT.

As stated yesterday, the RT can run Microsoft Office 2013 but no other x86 programs. The ARM based processor gets all day battery life but is underpowered for some uses. It is literally a hybrid device trying to maintain the benefits of the PC but at the same time moving the ball forward toward a productivity tablet.

In my opinion, the Surface RT is more of a tablet with some laptop capabilities. The Surface Pro, the big brother to the Surface RT, is compatible with x86 programs and is more like a laptop with tablet capabilities. The two different types of Surface devices offer you a choice depending upon your usage needs. If you want to see my earlier review of the Surface Pro click here.

For teachers, Microsoft Word 2013 is a gem. Much of what teachers and students do is writing in some form or fashion and the new Word 2013 is the premiere word processor that is available for free with the Surface RT. One of the complaints from iPad users is that many wish the Microsoft Office Suite of programs were available on it. To date, this has not happened although there are occasional rumors that this might happen in the future. This currently gives the Surface RT the advantage over the iPad when it comes to getting productive work completed on a tablet using standard office applications.

The new Word 2013 features the familiar “Ribbon Interface” that first became available in 2007. Word 2013 is still a Desktop application on the RT but the icons on the ribbon have been spaced apart to make it a bit easier to use on a touchscreen.

I will spare you the details of all the capabilities of Word 2013 as it is a comprehensive list. Most users only touch the surface (pardon the pun) of Word’s capabilities. Since Office 2013 is a port over to the new ARM-based processor on the Surface RT there are a few capabilities that the ARM-based version of Office 2013 cannot do. This is more noticeable with Excel 2013, that does not support macros, and in OneNote 2013, that does not support audio and video recording on the Surface RT.

Worth the Price of Admission - Inking

One of the shining capabilities that Microsoft Word 2013 offers teachers is probably one of its least used. Word 2013 supports inking!!! Actually, all of the big four Office applications since 2003 support inking and this goes back to the Tablet PC days where Microsoft has been innovating for over a decade. This inking technology is a must know feature for teachers and students that use the Surface RT.

For teachers inking is a big deal on a touchscreen tablet like the Surface RT. For students, having the ability to take notes in a freehand format is also a great feature. To get to the inking capabilities in Word 2013 go to the REVIEW tab on the ribbon and select START INKING located in the upper right-hand area of the ribbon. Once you select START INKING you will see a new Tab on the ribbon called INK TOOLS –PEN. From here you can select the color of ink you want, select the highlighter tools, and other inking selections including Eraser and Select Objects.

You can use your finger to ink but I prefer the rubber tipped stylus that are made to use with capacitive touchscreens. You can essentially turn Microsoft Word 2013 (or OneNote 2013) into a Whiteboard.  If you connect the Surface RT to a projector or HDTV via its microHDMI port you have a touch-enabled display for your entire class to view.

The Surface RT uses a capacitive touch screen similar to the iPad and only supports finger input or a stylus with the little rubber tips. Your finger and the rubber tipped stylus do not allow for a great deal of accuracy when inking on the Surface RT but it is certainly doable. It is kind of like finger painting or writing with a stick in the mud, the inking experience on the RT does not support a lot of control for fine-motor work.

Keep in mind that I have become spoiled by the fantastic inking experience on the Surface Pro that utilizes an active digitizer screen with digital Pen input. This is a much more natural experience similar to a ball-point pen when writing on paper. It is also much more accurate as the Surface Pro supports “palm-blocking” technology that allows you to rest your palm on the touchscreen when writing with the digital Pen. If you do a lot of inking, the Surface Pro is well worth the extra money as it provides a faster, smoother, and more accurate inking experience that is a pleasure to use. It is so good that many artists are beginning to use the Surface Pro for their artwork.

Back to the Surface RT, given that qualification that the Surface Pro offers a superior inking experience, you can still do a lot with the Surface RT.

Grading papers is something that teachers routinely do and the Surface RT can be easily adapted into a paperless classroom environment. Using Word 2013 you can mark student papers with your natural handwriting annotations, save the document as a PDF file so the student cannot change the annotations, and email the Word document back to the student or save it to a network storage area that the student can access. You could also save it to SkyDrive if your organization allows its use in school and share it back with the student from there. This Surface RT offers many, many possibilities for a paperless workflow.

Two other features I want to mention about Word 2013 before I finish todays post are the pinch and zoom capability within Word and the ability to open PDF files and edit them with Word 2013.

Having the ability to open and edit a PDF file is something many teachers need to do from time-to-time and Word 2013 now has this built into the program. Once you have the document open and have enabled editing you can of course annotate it with the inking tools available in Word 2013.

I am really enjoying the inking capability of Word 2013. I even copy some of my Google Docs into Word so I can have easy access to the inking tools. This ability is very handy and practical for teachers!

Until next time...

Keep on Learning,

Tom Grissom, PhD

Follow me on Twitter @tomgrissom

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