Once you have been through these notes you will need to complete the workbook

1.Introduction No matter where you are or what you are doing, you are surrounded by Information Technology. But what does the term, 'Information Technology' actually mean? It is a term that encompasses all forms of technology used to create, store, exchange and use information. To find out about some of the other basic concepts of ICT, use the menu on the left hand side to navigate through the pages. Once you have read all of the theory, answer the questions in your workbook.

2. Hardware Hardware is any part of the computer that you can physically touch, pick up, hold, move around the room etc. Examples of hardware include the monitor, mouse, hard disk, motherboard etc. View Pictures

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3. Software Software are the applications and programming instructions needed to make the computer hardware do useful work. Some examples of systems software which tells the computer what to do: Operating System Utilities User Interface

Continued Some examples of application software which allow you to do your work: Word processors such as Microsoft Word Spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel Databases such as Microsoft Access

4. Peripherals A peripheral is any hardware device which connects to the computer and is controlled by the Central Processing Unit CPU -with the exception of memory. When you are trying to think of examples of peripherals, think of things which plug into the back of the box.

Continued Examples are: monitor keyboard mouse printer scanner speakers external hard drives

Peripheral Devices

5. Bits and Bytes When you are using a computer you are probably opening documents, sending s, checking web pages etc. All of these items are made up of data. Your computer needs to be able to read this data so that it can respond to your requests e.g. making a word bold, sending a document to print.

Continued But, the computer doesn't understand the words on the page. It can only deal with binary data - yes, you knew those maths lessons would come in useful some time! Binary data consists of just two values, 0 and 1. So, the smallest piece of data that can be stored is called a 'bit' and that is either a 0 or a 1. The term 'bit' comes from 'binary digit'

Continued However, a bit is just that weeny bit too small for even the computer to deal with. So, it usually deals with 8 bits at a time. 8 bits of data are called a 'byte' One keyboard letter, for example, 'a' or 'd' is one byte in size. So a page which contains 100 letters would be 100 bytes in size.

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6. Storage Devices You now know the terms 'bit' and 'byte' However, we normally refer to the capacity of a storage device in terms of: Kilobytes (KB) Megabytes (MB) Gigabytes (GB) or even Terabytes!

Storage sizes

Continued You need to know the size order of the different storage units and how they compare to one another Blooming (bit) Belle (Byte) Killed the (Kilobyte) Mad (Megabyte) Gabby (Gigabyte) Teacher (Terabyte)

7. Document Sizes Here are some examples of different document sizes -you don't need to learn these. They are just here to help you put the different storage sizes into context.

Document sizes

You have now completed the theory section. Now complete ‘Workbook 1’ to check your understanding.