Fox Road Media Tech Tips: February
February is all about being an Risk Taker!
Looking for PYP Read-Alouds? Look no further!
Risk Taker Books
Cathy Williams, Buffalo Soldier
Delivering Justice: W.W. law and the Fight for Civil Rights
Farmer Will Allen and the Growing Table
Fifty Cents and a Dream
Major Taylor
The Price of Freedom
Looking to Integrate Technology into Your Lessons?
Tech Bytes: Alphabet Soup
February's Tech Tip:
Let's Talk Acronyms.
The world of computers is over-run with acronyms and it's so easy to get lost in this digital jargon sea. Often it seems that these terms exist only to confuse the neophyte computer user but honestly, they also baffle many a certified systems engineer. Here are a few of the best-known Computer acronyms and a brief explanation of each:
1) LAN - (Local Area Network) - This is an in-house network of connected computers. These computers and server may or may not access the Internet.
2) WAN - (Wide Area Network) - This a network which connect multiple LANs. The WCPSS Wan is represented by all of the schools and admin offices which communicate over a wide geographic area.
3) CPU (Central Processing Unit) - This is the brain of your computer. Sometimes referred to as a "Proc", this is the main chip in your PC and it handles all requests from and to external devices as well as across its own motherboard.
4) POP - (Post Office Protocol) - The protocol used by most email clients to retrieve
electronic mail.
5) BIOS - (Basic Input/Output System) - BIOS is the very important set of instructions that manages your hard drive. BIOS lives on a chip on the computer mother board and is typically first in the series of memory chips to initialize on start up.
6) USB - (Universal Serial Bus) - The USB is the port or ports which allow external devices like mouses, game controllers, flash drives and keyboards to interface with the computer system. While most computers these days may only have 2 to 6 on-board USB ports you can, with the use of hubs, add up to 127 devices to a single USB port...and if you are able to accomplish that please email me a photo.
7) URL - (Uniform Resource Locator) - In simplest terms a URL is the address of a specific file or web page on the Internet.
8) JPEG - (Joint Photographers Expert Group) - JPEGs are compressed image or photographic files. The best feature of JPEGs is that they are not limited in the number of colors they can display and are preferred to GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) files which can only display a limited range of colors.
9) DOS - (Disk Operating System) - DOS is the grand-daddy of all current, and especially Windows, operating systems. Actually, DOS still exists today and you can get to it by accessing the "Run" window on your computer.
10) OSI - (Open Systems Interconnection) - The OSI model is a seven layer collection of rules and standards that all computing systems must adhere to. Any digital device you have ever held or worked with follows the OSI model. See below for a graphic of the model.
Those are just a few of the most common computer acronyms you may encounter; there are thousands more and with the advent of social media, a whole lexicon of specialized terms have come into existence. It's a brave new world, again, OMG!