Digital Literacy:
Introduction to Computers.
Practice lessons for understanding
how and why the computer works!
You have probably picked up bits and pieces of information while using and working around computers. This can leave some pretty big gaps in your digital literacy.
These lessons fill in the missing pieces and tie it all together. This on-line instruction is text, animation and graphic.
This site is part of Eastern High Schools Technology Department and maintained and used by Denny Arnett's classes.
We do a lot of revising and updating, but with computers, today's best is tomorrow's dinosaur. Let us know when you spot something that needs attention on the web.
How These Lessons Work
Browsers
These lessons are formatted using style sheets.
Microsoft Internet Explorer gives full formatting, starting
with IE 3.0.
Netscape has some issues.
Where you are:
Intro >
Lessons
Resolution and Color Depth
The layout was designed to look best and be the easiest to read at a resolution of 800 x
600.
The graphics were designed for at least
16 bit color, that is Hi Color, which is the next step up
from 256 colors. If some colors look ugly or speckled to you (especially
the page background), you are probably using 256 colors.
Frames
Several lessons in Computer Basics contain pages that use invisible frames. You can click on part of an image on the left and the description will show on the right. There are links to No Frames versions of these pages, too. If your browser does not support frames, you should see a link to the equivalent No Frames page. If you run into problems with this, please let me know at the email address at the bottom of the page. All my browsers support frames, so I can't test this action myself.
Navigation
| You will find a menu of lessons at the top right of each page. | |
| The course logo at the top right of each page is a link back to the home page for the lessons, which is this page that you are reading. |
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| A few framed pages won't have the lesson topics visible unless you click on "Lesson Menu" in the logo. Then the menu will appear in the right hand frame below it. |
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| At the bottom of each page are links back to the homepage of the set of lessons, to the previous page, and to the next page in the sequence. |
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Quizzes
After each lesson section, there is a review quiz. I'm not keeping score though. If your first choice of answer doesn't suit, keep on trying. You'll get a popup message after each choice.
Exercises
The hands-on topics have student exercises at the end which give you practice and add new skills, too. These are your "homework" exercises. Don't skip them!
Where did all of this come from?
The Computer Basics lessons are based on my lecture notes and some old PowerPoint presentations I developed for a college course I taught on computer literacy a while back at Roane State Community College here in Tennessee. They represent the core information from half of the course, the other half being the hands-on assignments with Microsoft Office software. So if you master the materials contained in Computer Basics, you may consider yourself to have done half of a college computer literacy course. And for no fees! Aren't you smart!!
The other topics Working with Windows, Working with Words, Working with Numbers, Working with the Web, and Working with Presentations are hands-on lessons that guide you as you actually work at the computer. Different courses would use different combinations of these topics.
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Each Unit is required for Computer Introduction class. |
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Where you are: Intro > Lessons