My wife took the giant leap Thanksgiving weekend and bought 4 Surface 2 machines (32Gb) for her school. Documentation is an important component of emergent curriculum and her hope is that the Surfaces will be used by staff and parents to capture pictures, video, and notes of children learning through play.

Now, of course, it has fallen to me to set up the machines, load the necessary apps, figure out how to get all of the data moved around so she can access it and use it, and teach people how to do the actual work. Set-up was pretty straightforward – I created four Microsoft accounts for the users plus a master account for my wife. The user accounts reflect the four principal areas of activity in the school and the idea is that any user can grab any machine, sign in to the appropriate area, and start recording. Each account is set up to upload photos and video to OneDrive, so at the end of each day, the files are moved out of the Surface memory (did I mention that the school has no Internet access yet? So, all of this upload occurs after she brings the machines home.). Once each week, I download the files from the user accounts to a dedicated hard drive which she can access from her desktop machine.

I was very impressed with the adaptability of Windows 8.1 and the ease with which all of this was accomplished. After the first machine was running the way I wanted it, it was simple (if somewhat tedious) to sign in to each account on each machine and let Windows transfer the settings and preferences.

I only had to call Microsoft once: it turns out that OneDrive moves things around by compressing the files and I hit a snag when large video clips got mixed in with photos. The videos seem to be sent uncompressed and the extraction routine couldn’t cope with the mix. Easy enough to avoid the problem once I knew what was going on.