A serious consideration for those of us in education is that we have to really maximize our resources. We might want to teach technology-connected lessons that involve the use of peripheral devices such as scanners and digital cameras. Many educators wonder how these devices connect to our PCs. This article will look at two of the most common connection types.

When connecting peripheral devices to your computer, you have a decision to make. Very few computers today use the old-fashioned serial ports. These were nine pin connectors and we used to connect external modems, older Palm Pilot cradles, and even older mice with these ports.

Nowadays, we mostly use either USB or Firewire ports. These are not only much faster than serial ports, but they are hot-swappable. This means that you don’t have to re-boot when you attach your device.

USB 1.1

Let’s start with USB ports. USB stands for Universal Serial Bus. The first version of USB is known as USB 1.1, and it can transfer data at 1.2 megabits per second. The ports themselves are narrow and rectangular. It is almost impossible to buy a PC these days without at least 2 USB ports already installed. If you have an older PC with out them, you can buy and install a USB expansion card, which typically has two ports. As long as you have Windows 98 or later, you are okay. If you have Windows 95, you may be out of luck. The earlier versions of Windows 95 did not offer support for USB. My advice is to stay away from USB on a computer with Windows 95. Even the versions that claim to support USB have lots of problems.

One really great feature of USB devices is that you can do what we call daisy-chaining. One USB port on your PC can theoretically support up to 127 devices! Let’s pretend that you only had one USB port on your PC. If you attached a USB keyboard to your PC, the keyboard might have 4 or more USB ports into which you could plug other USB devices. This means that you could connect a digital camera, a scanner, a flash memory hard drive, and a USB joystick to your keyboard. If your scanner had another two USB ports like the keyboard does, you could attach another two devices, even though your PC only has the one USB port.

The ability to connect devices in this manner is very handy. It means that you only need one PC to connect a number of devices. Of course, you will need as many USB cables as you have devices. Most devices come with cables already included. If not, you can purchase USB cables for around $10 each from any computer store, or maybe even Wal-Mart.

USB 2.0
USB 1.1 was (and still is) a great way to connect your devices. However, we now have USB 2.0 available. Remember that USB 1.1 transfers data at 12 megabits per second. Well, USB 2.0 transfers at 480 megabits per second! It still offers the same ability to daisy-chain, but with a huge increase in speed. For some device like mice and keyboards, this speed increase is not a factor. But if you're downloading video from a camcorder or digital camera, you'll want all the speed you can get. Those can be very large files! USB 2.0 ports can handle 1.1 devices, but they run at 1.1 speed. Expect future versions of USB to have even faster speeds.

Firewire
Our friends at Apple came up with another very high speed connection known as IEEE 1394. This didn’t sound like a good name, so they decided to call it Firewire. Firewire transfers data at 400 megabits per second. It is made for both Apple machines and PCs. If you have an external Hard drive or CD burner, you may find that they require a Firewire connection. The developers are working on a version of Firewire that will move up to 3.2 gigabits of data per second, eventually.

So which way should you go if you are faced with getting a new PC? Probably the best way to go today is to get a PC with a couple of USB 2.0 ports and at least one Firewire port. It is always a good idea to get a machine with as much flexibility as possible, especially in the world of education.