Text editing¶
Open a text editor and type a list of the parts of the computer (hardware) you know:
1) Monitor
2) …
3)
Advanced: Write the head of a Letter with your address aligned right:
| «Full Name» «Street» «Nº» «area code» «town» |
Closing documents¶
Press the close button in the title bar of the text editor window. The dialogue window shown on the right side will appear (only if you edited the document). Dialog widows like that appear very often when you close a window with an edited document. Usually you can’t access the window while the dialog window is shown.
Try the effects of the three buttons:
Closes the dialog and gives you access to the window again.
Opens a new dialog where you can choose, how and where to save the document. Click Cancel to get back to the document (we will discuss saving and organizing of files later)
Just closes the document – disregarding the changes you made.
Windows¶
Try the effects of the symbols in the title bar (see 2008-08-13)
Place three windows according to the the draft:
| window 1 | window 2 |
| window 3 (enabled) | |
There are many different ways to do it. Example: You can place the windows before sizing them or size them before placing.
There is no right or wrong way – whilst practicing you will learn the best and fastest way for you.
How to use a browser¶
A browser is a program for displaying web pages and embedded media.
There are many different browsers, but the most used is Mozilla Firefox. Firefox is developed by the Open-Source community and available for free (Windows, Linux, MacOS). You will find it in almost every Internet-café. Most other browsers are similar.
Open a firefox-window by clicking the firefox-icon inside the upper panel.
You will probably get a window according to this sheme (there might bee some more bars):
| Title bar |
| Menu bar |
| Navigation bar |
| Web page |
Title bar¶
The title bar shows the title of the actually loaded site. The buttons are the usual ones (see 2008-08-13).
Menu bar¶
When you click on one of the entries in the menu bar, a menu with commands is opened.
Example: click Bookmarks > Bookmark This Page. A dialog for saving a bookmark of the current page appears. Just click Done without making any changes to Name:, Folder: and Tags:. Click Bookmarks again. The new bookmark should appear at the bottom of the menu now.
Navigation bar¶
The large bar inside the navigation bar is the address bar. It shows the internet address (URL / URI) of the currently loaded page.
If you want to visit a web page, you can type the address of the page inside the address bar and press enter to get there.
(Doubleclick the current address to highlight it and it will be deleted when you start typing the new address.)
You don’t have to type the whole address – usually you only have to type the domain name and the suffix – the rest is filled in automatically as needed.
Parts of a URL:
- http:// Protocol that is used for transferring data. https:// is encrypted.
- www: world wide web acronym (not all sites)
- domain (%{color:#444}subdomain and% second level domain): the name of the domain were the web page is hosted
- suffix (first level domain) Examples:
- com: company
- org: organization
- net: network
- de fr gr: suffixes assigned to regions (us doesn’t exist → us american sites often use com)
- /page address inside the domain
The back button opens the previously visited page.
The forward button opens page that was shown before you went back.
The angle ∨ on the right side of the forward button opens a menu with the recent pages.
The refresh button reloads the current page. Sometimes useful if a page is displayed in a strange way or has been updated.
The stop button interrupts current page loading. Useful if loading a page takes too long and you want to go anywhere else.
The home button always opens a previously set homepage (for example email, news or another often used page).
Web pages usually contain links to other web pages. Links can be text (usually underlined) or images. If you move the mouse pointer over them, the appearance of the mousepointer changes (usually to a hand symbol). If you click the link, the linked web page is loaded.
Example:
Go to the main page of the BBC by typing bbc.co.uk in the address bar.
Maybe you want to read some of the linked articles. You can just click one, read it and then go back to the main page and select the next one.
Skype¶
Together we created a skype account for one of the students and chatted with this account and some already existing ones.
More skype usage will follow after creating email accounts for all and checking the sound settings of the computers.
