Information Technology Intermediate 1

Introducing the Internet

Lesson 3

So far, we have looked at different parts of the computer, hardware and software, and some of the basic techniques involved in using a PC.

This week, we will move on to look at an important – and fun – part of using a computer, the internet, or ‘world wide web’.

The internet became popular during the 1990s and now plays a hugely important role in many work and leisure activities. You will be expected to use the internet to find out information during your course at Stow, and may well be expected to use it in the workplace or at university once you leave.

The internet is rather like a gigantic book, with many millions of pages. Lots of these pages are in foreign languages, or are of no interest to you – so where do you start?

Switch on the computer if you haven’t already done so, and log in using your student ID.

Go to the start menu and choose Internet Explorer. This is a program that allows us to access the internet – a ‘browser’. There are other browsers, such as Mozilla or Netscape, but Internet Explorer is the most popular.

You will probably see the MSN homepage to start with. The ‘homepage’ is the page that your computer goes to when you start up the internet.

Look carefully at the screen. You should see some icons across the top – a back button, a forward button, a ‘home’ button (to take you back to your homepage’ and a refresh button – to reload the screen that you’re on.

Below this, you should see an address bar.

Click once in the address bar. It should highlight the address in blue.

Type in www.bbc.co.uk and press return on your keyboard, or click ‘go’ at the end of the address bar. You should now see the BBC website.

Click the back button. This takes you back to the MSN page – now click the forward button to go back to the BBC page.

Organisations like the BBC have a huge amount of money to invest in their websites, and have lots of online resources. Usually these resources are available for free, which makes them very handy for students!

As you can see, there is quite a lot of information on here, and it isn’t always arranged the same way as it would be in a book or magazine.

There are lots of links on the BBC webpage. Links are words or pictures which, when you click on them, will take you to a new website. Sometimes they are underlined, and sometimes they are just a different colour from the other words on the page.

Move the mouse over the word ‘News’. It should become a pointing hand – this means that you have the mouse over a link.

Click on the word ‘News’. In the middle of the new page, you will see the main news headlines. The BBC website is updated every few seconds – so you get the news much faster than waiting for the TV!

Click on any news story that interests you. You should notice that the column on the left stays the same – it lets you ‘jump’ to your local news, or to specific areas like Education. Click on ‘Scotland’ now to jump to the Scottish news. Try clicking on different links to see where they take you.

You can click on the BBC icon in the top left corner of the screen to go back to the main BBC page. From here, you can get into lots of different parts of the BBC webpage.

Click on the BBC icon now.

In the top left corner of this screen, you should see a white box and ‘explore BBC’.

Type in ‘mental health’ and press search. The search engine will search the BBC website