Day 23 – Podcasts on the Surface RT

30 Days with a Surface RT for Teachers 

Teaching and Learning with a Windows 8 Tablet

I continue to find value in the Surface RT tablet for teaching and learning purposes. Yesterday I lauded the USB port and microSD card slot that allows for expandable storage on the Surface RT.

What this means to me in practical terms is that I can load up a USB flash drive full of educational WMV’s, MP3’s, and MP4’s and have hours/days of listening and viewing on the Surface RT. Where do I get these free educational recordings in audio and video formats? Podcasts.

 

I have one central Desktop computer with a large hard drive that I use as my main media storage computer. I occasionally copy files to other devices, like the Surface RT, that I want to listen or view the content on while on the road. This allows me to manage my media collection without having to re-download media files from device to device wirelessly.

A 32GB Flash Drive can be purchased for under $20 now and if you are in a school setting using a USB Flash drive is often times more convenient to access multimedia content than downloading selected files to every single tablet over wireless. This also saves tremendous bandwidth costs and provides easy local access to bypass areas that do not have WiFi access. Even if you do have wireless available there are times when a network will become congested and videos will often start buffering and become unwatchable. This is particularly true if you send 30 students to the same video at the same time on the network. Having videos play locally on the local device avoids this problem.

In a perfect world we would have enough bandwidth to do what we wanted to, but for many schools this is just not the case. The Surface RT has been great at playing back HD quality videos off of the USB port.

If a 32GB Flash Drive is not enough storage for you how about a 1 Terabyte USB drive? Yes, the Surface RT will access a 1 TB USB drive that can store hundreds of HD quality MP4 files. This is another advantage of having the Desktop mode on the RT as you can use the traditional file manager to access audio and video files.

You can even connect the Surface RT to a projector or big screen HDTV if you like and if you use the 1 TB USB drive full of educational media you will have months of listening and/or viewing content available for your classroom.

Podcast Catcher Apps

There are two podcast catcher apps that I routinely use on the Surface RT. Podcasts! and Slap Dash Podcast, both are available for free in the Windows Store.

 

These apps are similar but they have different styles and different catalogs. 
 

When I am looking for something I will do a search in both catalogs to see if there is anything new I am interested in. Apple has not yet made an iTunes client available on Windows 8 but I find these two podcast apps more than adequate and a good replacement for iTunes. Plus, you already have Xbox Music for all your music needs.

 

The other nice thing about the Podcasts! and Slap Dash Podcast apps are that they give me the freedom to “live stream” audio and video podcasts to the Surface RT. When I stream I do not have to worry about downloading them and taking up storage space on the RT. The choice is yours, whether you want to subscribe and download or just stream audio/video when you have a wireless connection.

Be aware that streaming can use massive amounts of bandwidth so be mindful if you are using a metered Internet connection with data caps. This is another reason I use one central computer as it is hard-wired to a LAN connection and it is much faster downloading large video files.

Podcasts! and Slap Dash Podcast on the Surface RT gives me access to a catalog of thousands of free podcasts. Please give one or both a try on the Surface RT and see what you think. 

Might I suggest our TechTalk4Teachers podcast :)

 

Here is the TechTalk4Teachers RSS Feed, if you cannot find TechTalk4Teachers in the catalog you can manually add it  in either podcast catcher by typing in our RSS feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/techtalk4teachers

 

Until next time...
Keep on Learning,

Tom Grissom, PhD

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@tomgrissom

Interested in Teaching and Learning with Technology?
http://www.eiu.edu/itc/

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http://techtalk4teachers.blogspot.com/