Childrens Educational Software

Page 4

The Internet

The internet is an important part of computer use and its important to know the names of different terms and understand some of the elements involved. The internet is simply a huge linking of computers together throughout the world and the world wide web is the mass of data on those computers such as web pages that can be accessed from the computers.

In order to look at web pages you open your web browser, the packaged with windows is Internet Explorer, to open or start it just left click on its icon. Other browsers include firefox, opera.

To find web pages on the internet you can use a search engine such as GOOGLE. To find something on a particular topic enter some relevant subject matter about the topic into the search engine text box, you then left click the "google search" button.

For instance if you have a chicken which has some sort of ailment and its feet are red and scaly you could put the words " chicken red scaly feet ". A list of results will appear the first line will be an underligned title and under it an abstract of information describing the information that would be seen if you go to the web page. The underlined title is a hyper link and clicking on it will take you to the main web page.

Lets look in a little detail at web pages. There is more behind what you can see in the browser ; its the web browser that displays the page nicely with coloured text and embeded pictures. Because its the web browser that does the displaying of a web page, the same web page can look a little different using a different browser.

Web pages are hypertext documents and written in Hypertext Mark up Language (HTML) web pages files usually have a .html extension. We can create a simple web page thus :

The <> are known as tags they are paired with <> and The "h2" tag tells the browser that the text should be H2 size.Web page files like the one above but perhaps a bit more complicated sit or are "hosted" on a computer on the internet .

In simple terms when you search for a particular topic and click on a link , it may take you to a page just like we have constructed and it would appear just as it does when we open it locally on our computer.

What the browser does using the hyper link which is a URL(uniform resource locater) it directs our browser to the server holding a web page mapped by the URL. Your computer ( the client ) sends a http (hypertext transfer protocol) request to the server holding the page.

Malware & Viruses

Malware allows malicious and intrusion of your computer. A typical type of malware is where someone accesses your computer while you are on line and can basically see what your typing or keying in , thus if you are doing on line banking they can know your bank details

A firewall stops this sort of attack , it allows you to access out through the firewall but by setting a few parameters intrusive attack can be blocked.

Viruses are basically small programmes designed to harm your computer , for instance by it crashing or going slow. Your computer system can be infected by downloading material from unreliable sources. Viruses can alter your system as attachments in emails. Anti virus programmes as designed to find and remove viruses from your system. Free good anti virus include avast fromAvast