The Internet, The Web, Browsers and Search Engines.

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1 Learning Objectives

  • In this lesson you will develop an understanding of the learning strand Network and Communications on your progress ladder, working towards yellow level.

Understanding and being able to explain:

  • what world wide web is
  • what the Internet is
  • what a web browser is
  • what a search engine is

2 Introduction

  • Throughout this unit, you're going to occasionally make notes and answer questions.
  • Use a text editor to record your progress as you go along.

Present It

  • Create a new directory called The-Internet.
  • Create a new file and call it Notes.
  • Title your new document How The Internet Works
  • Under a subtitle (Introduction), try complete the following sentences without asking for help or looking up answers. Just answer according to what you currently know.
    • I think that the Internet is….
    • I think that the World Wide Web is…
    • I think that a Web Browser is…
    • I think that a Search Engine is…

Save It

  • Save your work. Call it How-the-internet-works

3 The Internet

  • Most people don't know what the Internet is or how it works, even though they use it every day.
  • In reality, The Internet is a global network of computers, connected by fibre optic and copper cables or wireless and satellite signals.
  • On it's own, the internet is nothing more than a lot of very expensive equipment.

Research It

  • Use online resources to find out a little bit about what Fibre Optic cables are.
  • Find out where the world's longest fibre optic cables can be found.

Present It

  • Add into your notes your new understanding of what The Internet is.
  • Add into your notes what Fibre Optic cables are.
  • Try and find some images that illustrate your findings.

Save It

  • Save your work

4 The World Wide Web (from now on just called the web)

Tim_Berners-Lee-Knight-crop.jpg

  • Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web back in 1989.
  • To understand how the Web works, we're going to create a little web-page.
    • Create a new directory somewhere in your directory. Call it myWebsite

Try It:

  • With this page open on your Firefox web browser, type ctrl+U, this is control and U all together.
  • You will see something similar to this:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
<head>
<title>The Internet, The Web, Browsers and Search Engines.</title>
<meta  http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
<meta  name="generator" content="Org-mode" />
<style type="text/css">
.
.
.
  • Try ctrl+U on a different webpage, such as www.bbc.co.uk
  • You should see something similar to the above output on your screen.
  • Pay attention to the line starting with:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC ...
  • The line tells the browser the webpage is a html document.
  • All webpages are made of html documents

Research It

  • Search online on how to make a hyper link in a html document
  • Add the line of code you find to your notes.

Key Points to Remember

  • The world wide web is a collection of html documents, like those that you have seen.
  • They all link to each other using hyper links.
  • The html documents are stored on different computers all over the world.
  • These computers are called Web Servers

Cern_datacenter.jpg

Research It

  • Try to find out the following information
    • What was the worlds first web page?
    • How many web pages currently make up the World Wide Web?

Present It

  • Write up your findings. Be sure to include a description of what the web is.

Save It

  • Save your work

5 Web Browsers

  • A web browser is a piece of software that you have installed on your

computer

Research It

  • For each of the browser icons shown below, find out the name of the browser and the company that makes it.

browser_logos.png

Present It

  • Present your findings on different web browsers in your notes.
  • Which of the web browsers is currently the most popular in the world?

Research It

  • Find out what a web browser actually does?
  • What are the major differences between the different web browsers?

Present It

  • Add your findings to your notes.

Save It

  • Don't forget to save your notes.

6 Search Engines

Research It

  • Watch the following video about Google search. Most search engines like Bing, Duck Duck Go and Yahoo work in much the same way.

Present It

  • Write up what you learned in your notes. You should be able to do it in a paragraph or two.

Save It

  • Save your work.

7 Assess Your Understanding

  • Try to assess your understanding by taking this quiz here
  • If you have scored 80% or higher, well done.
  • If you did not sore as high, can you re-read the notes to see what you have missed?
  • Take a screenshot of your quiz result and add it to your notes

8 Present Your Notes

Badge It:

  • To get your badge for this section, you're going to need to upload your notes you have been taking
  • Silver: your notes show some basic understanding of the 4 concepts
  • Gold: your notes show clear understanding of the 4 concepts
  • Platinum: your notes show excellent understanding of the 4 concepts with appropriate examples and good English

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