Welcome to Computer Applications

Hello and welcome to my class blog. I hope that you had a great summer. I know that it was hard to come back but I hope that you are looking forward to your year here at Ereckson. I have a lot of fun things planned for us this year such and creating podcasts, writing blogs, wikis and sharing information you have researched with each other. We will also take apart computers, learn about the internet and create our own webpages. I hope that you are looking forward to this year, I know that I am.

Web Logs

A Web log or Blog as they are more commonly known are designed for immediate publication for such media events as online journals or diaries. A blog gives you a chance to write your feelings, emotions or opinions over a given topic. A Blog is designed for conversation and comment or feedback back to you. A blog is written to inform and yet at the same time is asking for reader comment into a particular topic. Please remember that a blog can and will be seen by others so that you will want to be careful about what you write. Journal or blog sites such as Myspace have been used by colleges and potential employers to see what type of person you are, and some people have been rejected by colleges due to their blog site and others have been looked over for job employment do to they same problem. More and more people are looking online to find out things about you. Always be careful as to what you put out on the internet, because it can always come back around to hurt you later.

Plagiarism

Should I be able to cut and paste from the Internet? Many teenagers have only known the world with online references. With these abilities to gain access to many different materials on any given topic it also gives us the ability to copy and paste these materials onto our computer. On the one hand it makes it easier to find reference materials that you need to use for you research, but on the other hand you are taking and using work that you didn't not create, therefore causing you to lose part of your creative thinking, not to mention that it is also cheating. In your journal list for me one pro and one con to copying and pasting work from the Internet into your own work.

Veterans Day

In 1921, an unknown World War I soldier was buried in Arlington National Cemetary. This site, on a hillside overlooking the Potomac River and the city of Washington, became the focal point of reverence for America's veterans.

Similar ceremonies occurred in England and France, where an unknown soldier was buried in each nation's highest place of honor. These memorial gestures all took place on November 11, giving universal recognition to the celebrated ending of World War I fighting at 11 a.m., November 11, 1918 (the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month). The day became known as "Armistice Day."

Armistice Day officially received its name in America in 1926 through a Congressional resolution. It became a national holiday 12 years later by similar Congressional action. If the idealistic hope had been realized that World War I was "the war to end all wars," November 11 might still be called Armistice Day. But only a few years after the holiday was proclaimed, war broke out in Europe. Sixteen and one-half million Americans took part. Four hundred seven thousand of them died in service, more than 292,000 in battle.

To pay tribute to those who had served in this latest, great war came in a proposal made by Rep. Edwin Rees of Kansas: Change the name of Armistice Day to Veterans Day, and make it an occasion to honor those who have served America in all wars. In 1954 President Eisenhower signed a bill proclaiming November 11 as Veterans Day.

Today for your warmup, write and honor someone you know who has served in the military, if you do not know someone who has served in the military then answer this question; how important is it for us to honor the men and women who have served our country in the armed forces?

What is HTML?

HTML is the computer language that is used to create documents for display on the Web. Many editors exist to create Web Pages--Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Frontpage, Dreamweaver and GoLive are just a few. Nevertheless, each of these software programs performs the exact same task, they all generate HTML language.

The HTML language consists of a series of HTML tags. Learning HTML involves finding out what tags are used to mark the parts of a document and how these tags are used in creating an HTML document.

Tags are instructions that tell your browser what to show on a Web page. They break up your document into basic sections. All tags start with a <>.

The text editor is any program that saves the text characters you type, but does not save additional information about the formatting of the page. If you save the word "Hello" in both Word and Notepad, Word would require 19,000 bytes of storage space to save the word and all of the information about the page formatting, while Notepad would require only 5 bytes of storage space because it saves each character typed into the document.

What are some benefits of using Notepad over using Word or any other software program other than it does not take up much storage space?

Halloween

Halloween is celebrated annually, but how did the holiday start? It started with the Celtics. They believed that On October 31 summer officially ended. They thought that on that night disembodied spirits of all those who had died throughout the preceding year would come back in search of living bodies to possess for the next year. It was believed to be their only hope for the afterlife. So on October 31 Celts would dress up in all manner of ghoulish costumes and noisily parade around the neighborhood, being as destructive as possible to frighten away spirits looking for bodies to possess. In the 1840's the custom of Halloween was brought to America by Irish Immigrants. In America we turned it more into a holiday in which we would travel from house to house trick or treating our neighbors for candy and carving pumpkins to make Jack O Lanterns. In your wamup tell me about your favorite halloween, what were you dressed as, did you have more candy than you could eat, or did you go to a really cool haunted house.

Search Engines

A search engine allows us to type in a topic or keyword and then gives us the results of the search usually in a way that the relevant information is given to us first. Other types of search engines use a directory to search for the topic that you are trying to research. You can also use a metasearch engine to search the search engines to find results for the topic of your searches. With exploring some of the different search engines that you like to use, is the data the they give to you in the results important to you; like knowing the number of results, having relevant web pages listed first, or listing the most popular web sites first for you? What else could you add to a search engine that would help aid in searches?