Microsoft Office 365

Minggu, 04 Agustus 2013

Day 15 – Thoughts Halfway through 30 Days with the Surface RT – Is it Worth It?

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

Well, I am halfway through this 30 Days with a Surface RT blog series and this is a good time to reflect on my experiences to date with the Surface RT. First of all, I went into this thinking I had a good handle on what the Surface RT could do. For the most part my expectations have been confirmed but there have been some surprises as well. I went into this with low expectations from press reports but have found my experience contrary to much of what I have previously read. With many 1:1 initiatives being considered across the nation more real-world information is needed about device capabilities before purchasing decisions are made.

http://www.microsoft.com/education/en-us/Pages/index.aspx

Microsoft is currently offering the Surface RT at steep discounts for a limited time to schools and universities with an education price of $199 for the Surface RT alone, or $289 for the Surface RT and Type Cover Keyboard (I much prefer the type cover over the touch cover).

The Surface RT has taken a beating in the tech press and Microsoft has written-off $900 million dollars of Surface inventory due to over production. I have entered into this blog series at the low-point of Surface RT popularity.

One of the reasons I wanted to know for myself if the Surface RT is of any value for teaching and learning is due to the fact that Microsoft gave away 10,000 Surface RTs to teachers attending the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Conference in San Antonio, Texas earlier this year. Imagine the possibilities these educators have to improve the classroom experience for their students.

Educators that received a Surface RT at #iste13 have a wonderful opportunity to experience for themselves how they can use the Surface RT in the classroom. Of course, some will say that the RT is a paperweight and will just collect dust in the corner. That would truly be a shame as I have experienced for myself these past two weeks a wonderful teaching and learning tool for teachers and students. My first post in this series was called “Glass Half-empty or Half-full” at Day 15 it is definitely half-full for me however there are things that need improvement going forward. I also can say the same thing about the iPad as there is also room for improvement with it as well.

One thing that I am learning about the Surface RT is that it is not in the same category as the iPad and therefore should not be compared to it, but none the less most do. Since others are making this comparison I thought I would take a look at the current discounted pricing of the Surface RT compared to a discounted iPad and see what impact it might have on a purchasing decision given tight school or university budgets. Below is a graph of the total cost of purchasing between the iPad and Surface RT.

I used Microsoft Excel on the Surface RT to calculate the price difference between purchasing multiple Surface RTs and iPads in the quantities of 1, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100, 150, 200, 250, 300, 350, 400, 450, 500, 550, 600, 650, 700, 750, 800, 850, 900, 950, and 1000. Below is a screenshot from the Surface with the numbers.

I used a price of $289 for the 32GB Surface RT with Type Cover and $598 for the iPad with a cover and keyboard. The current price for a 32GB iPad is $599 without a cover or keyboard so I discounted it $100. This also does not include additional warranties or AppleCare. It also does not include wireless access costs or deployment servers that can easily double or triple the cost of the initial devices.

Many think that a few dollars difference in price per unit does not make that much of a difference in total costs but as you can see in the graph it makes a huge difference. Especially with larger quantities where the cost difference really begins to separate on the graph.

Depending upon your viewpoint this separation in price difference may be necessary to get the device for the job, or could be viewed as over-paying if the alternative meets or exceeds the requirements for the job.

So if you are buying 1000 devices for a 1:1 program the current price savings is $309,000 if you went the Surface RT vs. the iPad route. If you were a very large district and bought 10,000 devices that difference jumps to $3,090,000 – 3 Million dollars is a lot of money and a potential savings worthy of further investigation.

Looked at in a different way, you could buy devices for twice as many students for the same amount of money.

In these tight budget times there is enough of a cost difference to catch the attention of those who will be funding 1:1 initiatives, whether that be parents or taxpayers.

In the end the Surface RT should be judged on its capabilities and merits. Each institution will need to do their own homework and find the device that meets their needs based upon initial cost, functionality, deployment, and maintenance over a 3 or 4 year life-cycle. In year 4, most likely, you get to start the whole process over again, a lot can change in 4 years.

So, at the halfway point I have learned much but have much more to explore with the Surface RT. At this point I have more questions than answers, and that is a good thing.

Until next time...
Keep on Learning,

Tom Grissom, PhD

Follow me on Twitter @tomgrissom

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

Please subscribe and listen to the TechTalk4Teachers Podcast:
http://techtalk4teachers.blogspot.com/

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Sabtu, 03 Agustus 2013

Day 14 – PowerPoint 2013 on the Surface RT

30 Days with a Surface RT for Teachers

Teaching and Learning with a Windows 8 Tablet

Are you a fan of PowerPoint? Does the phrase “Death by PowerPoint” send a chill down your spine? Whether you are a fan of PowerPoint or not, I am sure we have all had less than stellar experiences sitting through a PowerPoint presentation, but it does not have to be this way.

For all the critics of PowerPoint out there I suggest we first take a look at the instructional approach taken when creating PowerPoints before passing judgment on the tool.

Like a golfer that blames a club for a terrible tee shot, so it is with PowerPoint for some. Do you blame that boring PowerPoint for not getting students engaged in the lesson or could it be your instructional approach?

PowerPoint is just a tool and the presentation you produce will become what you make of it, for better or worse.

Students need to be able to organize and present content and PowerPoint is a great choice for presentations. Too often students focus on the animations and transitions available in the tool rather than the content that needs sorting through. Discovering what is needed and what can be left out is challenging for most students. I have seen many PowerPoint slide decks with 50 or more slides that need to be covered during a 20 minute presentation.

PowerPoint 2013 on the Surface RT has the familiar bullet point slide show templates that we have all become so accustomed to over the years. Some will still copy and paste large blocks of text into PowerPoint slides and read them word…. for…. word to an audience. Some will go overboard with the animations and transitions, others will go for artsy pictures and avoid text all together. There is no one best way to use PowerPoint and that is what makes it fun.

The trick of an effective PowerPoint presentation is to find a balance and like most things in life moderation is the key. You will need to use your judgment to find a balance with the content, presentation options, and instructional strategies you wish to be cover during the time allotted for a presentation.

PowerPoint has supported inking for years and being able to annotate over a slide while explaining things is very valuable for learning new things. I am guessing that 50% of teachers do not even know that there are inking capabilities already in PowerPoint and that you do NOT need a touchscreen to use them.

Since the PowerPoint 2003 version (maybe even longer) you have been able to hover your mouse in the lower left-hand corner of a PowerPoint slide (when in Slide Show view) and access the Pen tool for annotating over a slide. It’s always been there, the ghosted icons will appear in the lower left corner when you move the pointer over them.

What makes this annotation ability really great on the Surface RT is that the RT does have a touchscreen and you can use your finger to select the Pen tool or laser pointer to direct a students attention to a point you are teaching. I can draw better with my finger than with the mouse.

Another really cool feature of PowerPoint 2013 on the Surface RT is the absolutely fantastic “Presenter Mode” that allows the teacher to have their slides with notes and a preview of the upcoming slide on the RT screen but when the RT is connected to a projector or HDTV the students only see the current slide.

The Presenter View also gives easier access to the Pen Tool, Laser Pointer, and forward and back arrows to advance to the next or previous slide. It even has a timer to keep track where you are at in your presentation to compare to the available time you have left.

I have found a couple of missing features on the RT version of PowerPoint 2013, most notably is the lack of the ability to record your PowerPoint presentation on the Surface RT. If you want audio/video recording capability you will have to use a device with the x86 version of PowerPoint 2013 like the Surface Pro.

The last benefit of PowerPoint 2013 that I want to mention is that it is loaded locally on the Surface RT for free. What this means for teachers and students is that you can create presentations anywhere, anytime, even if no Internet connection is available.

Using cloud services is great when everything works but too often in a school setting there may be areas of the school where wireless is unavailable or unreliable. It is good to have the option to work locally on the Surface RT until you can get to an Internet connection.

Until next time...

Keep on Learning,

Tom Grissom, PhD

Follow me on Twitter @tomgrissom

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

Please subscribe and listen to the TechTalk4Teachers Podcast:
http://techtalk4teachers.blogspot.com/

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Jumat, 02 Agustus 2013

Day 13 - Microsoft Excel 2013 on the Surface RT for Teachers

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

Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet program that is a very valuable addition for teachers working with numbers in the classroom. Whether you are just keeping track of student grades in a simple spreadsheet or collecting data for a Science experiment Excel is the best program for crunching numbers on the Surface RT.

I have taught Excel to teachers in the past and one of the nice features of using the Surface RT is the support of inking. Drawing the attention of the students eye to an area of the screen that you want the student to understand is very important when teaching someone something new. Yesterday, I shared that Word 2013 supports inking and how valuable it can be to annotate student work. The same is true for inking and Excel 2013. Being able to make handwritten notes next to formulas on an Excel spreadsheet makes the instruction much clearer than giving just oral instructions.

You get to inking in Excel 2013 similar to Word 2013. Go to the REVIEW Tab on the ribbon and select START INKING.

There are a couple of oddities that I have found in switching back and forth between inking and mouse mode when using Excel 2013. I sometimes have to double-click to select a specific cell when normally a single-click would do. I also have to sometimes press the ESC (Escape) Key to deselect something. It seems that Excel 2013 is not as fully baked as other programs so I expect Microsoft to continue to improve the ARM-based version to catch it up to the fully capable x86 version.

Unlike Word, Excel 2013 does not support pinch and zoom on the Surface RT. There is however a slider bar in the lower right-hand corner that allows you to slide for different zoom levels. Microsoft Word 2013 also has this zoom slider but I much prefer the pinch and zoom capability.

Of all the Office 2013 apps Excel seems to be the least touch friendly. I have had occasions where Excel will stutter and it sometimes does not seem to be as responsive to touch as the other Office 2013 applications. When using my fat fingers to move from cell to cell I really need to zoom in to get better accuracy.

Excel 2013 is the one app that causes me to reach for my Arc Mouse so I can use it as a traditional Desktop application. The Arc Mouse uses a wireless transceiver that I plug into the Surface RTs USB Port. The Arc Mouse gives me pinpoint accuracy when using Excel 2013 and makes for a much more pleasurable experience. I recommend finding a mouse if you will be using Excel very much on the Surface RT.

There are also a couple of other limitations with Excel 2013, most notably the lack of support for macros. The Surface RT version of Office 2013 is a port over to the ARM-based Surface RT system. This porting is not complete as some features like macros have not yet been enabled on the RT version. If you are only doing simple calculations this won’t be a big deal to you, but if you are an accountant you may find the RT version frustrating to use. If you do need the full power of the business class Excel 2013 program the Surface Pro would be a much better choice as it supports all of Excel’s functions including macro capability.

I have also ran into a few template issues that I tried to use with Excel 2013 on the Surface RT. Some templates I have used on the RT had problems with ActiveX components. Microsoft still has some work to do here to make Excel on ARM-based devices work as well as it does on x86 systems.

Overall the ability to run Excel 2013 on a tablet like the Surface RT is a positive. There are still some rough edges on the RT version but for basic spreadsheet work this capability is a great addition to the Surface RT.

Until next time...

Keep on Learning,

Tom Grissom, PhD

Follow me on Twitter @tomgrissom

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

Please subscribe and listen to the TechTalk4Teachers Podcast:
http://techtalk4teachers.blogspot.com/

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Kamis, 01 Agustus 2013

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

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

Please subscribe and listen to the TechTalk4Teachers Podcast:
http://techtalk4teachers.blogspot.com/

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Rabu, 31 Juli 2013

Day 11 – The Enigma that is the Surface RT

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

The Surface RT is an enigma. I can understand those that review the Surface RT not instantly understanding this device. Most reviewers are on a deadline and usually offer the cursory specifications and offer a couple of “needs improvement” comments to justify their critique after a couple of hours of use.

What is particularly confusing about the Surface RT is that it has a dual personality of the modern Windows 8 apps along with the traditional Desktop. Once you come to grips with this reality (it is really not that hard of a concept to grasp) you see the benefits of mixing the old with the new. But, the Surface RT adds another “exception” in that the RT is based on the ARM processor that is not compatible with x86 applications. To further complicate matters Microsoft has ported their best selling x86 application, Office 2013, to the ARM processor so it CAN run on the Surface RT. Got it? For the average user that is a lot to sort out.

The Surface RT has taken a beating in the press lately and many have dismissed this device completely. This really is a shame as my brief amount of time with this tablet has completely altered my original mindset since I began this blog series.

Day 2 was really rough for me with all of the updates that needed to be installed but since that time I have only had a couple of updates to deal with and both were painless. After Day 2 my expectations were pretty low, but since that time the RT has redeemed itself for the most part and I have only depleted the battery once over the past 11 days.

Since I started doing these 30 Days with…. blog series I have come to the conclusion that many of these superficial product reviews in the press are not that helpful, especially for teachers in a classroom setting. They all start to look alike and offer little in the way of practical hands-on advice. For the Surface RT this recently has become one giant echo chamber of doom and gloom in the press room, but what if they are wrong?

This is why I am blogging my experiences here in a real-life and practical manner for teachers and students to see an educators perspective. There are definitely bright spots in the Surface RT story that need to be told. One of the bright spots is Office 2013.

The dual personality of the Surface RT is a good thing overall. Having the ability to run the “Big Four” Office 2013 applications gives a teacher or student access to professional level tools at an incredible price point (currently the Surface RT is discounted to $199 education price, $289 with type cover, and that includes Office 2013).

The big four applications in Office 2013 are Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. This covers most of the tasks we ask teachers and students to do daily in the classroom. The Surface RT has an excellent browser that supports pinch and zoom and the Desktop has access to the File Explorer to manage all your files. Add in the ability to save documents to SkyDrive for anywhere access and you have a very compelling device for educators at a very affordable price.

I will be going into a little more depth in upcoming posts about the Office 2013 suite of applications but having them available on the ARM-based Surface RT is a nice luxury to have out of the box.

Until next time…

Keep on Learning,

Tom Grissom, Ph.D.

@tomgrissom

http://eiu.edu/itc/

http://techtalk4teachers.blogspot.com/

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Selasa, 30 Juli 2013

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.

Bing Apps

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.

Multitasking at its best.

Until next time…

Keep on Learning,

Tom Grissom, Ph.D.

@tomgrissom

http://eiu.edu/itc/

http://techtalk4teachers.blogspot.com/

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Senin, 29 Juli 2013

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.

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/

http://techtalk4teachers.blogspot.com/

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Microsoft Office 365

Recent Post

Day 15 – Thoughts Halfway through 30 Days with the Surface RT – Is it Worth It?

Day 14 – PowerPoint 2013 on the Surface RT

Day 13 - Microsoft Excel 2013 on the Surface RT for Teachers

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

Day 11 – The Enigma that is the Surface RT

Day 10 – Bing Apps Keep You Up-To-Date

Day 9 – The Mighty USB Port on the Surface RT

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