Lesson 2: More browsing and Internet
Lesson Outline
In this lesson we cover the following areas:
Get more used to navigate on internet
Make them aware there are several browsers, and navigate to several webs.
Get a bit of background on how Internet works
Try to explain to the students how from our laptop we can get connected to a server which is in a different place around the globe.
Setup
Make sure all the laptops are either plugged or with the battery full enough to last for 1 hour at least.
Instructor’s laptop is connected to the projector or big screen.
Do the attendance!
Content
Recap
Do a quick recap (5-10) of what we explained last day:
How to use trackpad
Different parts of the laptop
Open chrome and go to youtube
Keep surfing the internet
Ask the students to open a different browser and to do exactly the same steps they did last day with chrome. Since we are on a Mac, Safari could be the best option.
Explain to them that chrome and safari are just different flavours of the same thing: a window to the internet.
Triky point here is finding the icon to open a new tab with a different browser. All browsers have the + icon, but it might be placed in a different place. Try as much as you can to be the students by themself the ones finding it.
Back and forward buttons
Go to youtube and click several videos or links one after another. At some point ask the students to go back to the previous page. Show them how to use back and forward buttons.
Go to different servers
Ask them to navigate (any browser works) to different servers, like:
Wikipedia: www.wikipedia.org
Coursera: www.coursera.org
It is important to fully write the server’s name on a board, and ask them to write the whole name in the browser’s navigation box:
And once inside wikipedia, do a search. And explain again what’s the difference between searching in google (search the whole internet) and searching inside wikipedia (it searches only inside wikipedia).
Internet
Now let’s try to explain at a very high level how the Internet works.
What is it?
A global network. Explain what a network is: a group of computers connected to each other. A network can also be local, meaning that a few computers standing close to each other (in the same building) are connected to each other.
Internet is a world wide network. It connects all the computers around the world. And as it is world wide, Internet really makes physical distances not to be a problem anymore.
We can share information with everyone. It allows us to share pictures with someone who is on the other side of the world, we can socialise with anyone regardless of where he or she is living…
A bit of history about internet
How to connect to a server
As said from our laptop we can connect to any other computer in the world. A browser is a window to the Internet, a tool which can get us connected to everywhere.
And to connect to a specific computer we need to know its address, like wikipedia.org
This address is a unique identifier of a computer or server on the internet. Exactly as a postal address is a unique identifier of a house or physical place.
The problem of this model is that we need to know the address of all the servers we want to connect to. And of course this is not possible. And here is where search engines come into the scene.
Search engines
Imagine now that instead of connecting to wikipedia.org which is easy to remember, we want to check what’s the forecast for next days in Athens. For sure there is a server on the Internet that can provide this kind of information, but we don’t really know what its address is.
Easiest thing we can do is connect to a search engine and type a text explaining what we are looking for. In our case we would type something like: Forecast in Athens for next 7 days
Once a link gets clicked, the browser connects to the server that is hidden in the link.
This is what a search engine does: converting natural text in English, Arabic or any other languages to a list of links and each link takes us to a server on the Internet.
Make sure that the students notice that when they click a link, the address of the browser at the top gets changed.
And at the end google search is another server on the Internet. The only thing is that it loads as a default page in our browser as soon as we open it.
Also when we type a regular text in the browser navigation box and the browser notices that it is not a server’s name, it sends the link to the search engine. So at the end for us, typing a text in the two boxes above gives us the same result.
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