TE year1handbook/Year1 Unit1 Brief Explanation of Key Terms

Blogs: A blog (short for a web log) is a diary maintained on the world wide web. It is a web page with posts written by a person in reverse chronological order. Learners can use blogs to reflect, connect with others, use as an e-portfolio or journal etc. (Student-teachers can be encouraged to maintain blogs as their reflective journals during the course)

Discussion Forums : Discussion forums/boards are digital conversations /discussions on the Internet, on a specific topic.  They can be used to deliberate, express opinions about a topic in an asynchronous way which can facilitate greater participation. (Classroom discussions can continue on such virtual forums )

Emails : Electronic mail, commonly referred to as email or e-mail, is a method of communication where digital “letters” are exchanged. The author can send the letter to one or more recipients. When the author sends an email, it is stored in a server that the recipient can access whenever she/he is on-line. Each email id is unique and in the format <name>@<email server>. The author or the recipients need not be on-line at the same time to exchange messages.

Free of cost (gratis) v/s Free and Open: Many resources and applications on the Internet are available free of cost (gratis). However, the vendor offering the service may sell our information to advertisers. The user may have no freedom (right) other than the freedom to use the application or service. In contrast, 'Free and open” software (FOSS) applications or services allow users to have four significant freedoms – freedom to use, study, modify and share. Such freedoms are very critical to education, since sharing, studying and modifying/ adapting are all key educational processes. It is important to understand if any software or service being offered 'free' is free of cost alone, or the product/ service is also free to use/study/share/modify.

ICT – Information and Communication Technologies – ICTs refer to the infrastructure and devices that are used for creating , organizing, processing, presenting and communicating information. In the context of this course, ICTs refer to digital ICTs, where information is stored and communicated in digital formats, which enable users to access, store, transmit, and manipulate information in ways much faster and easier than before. 

Information Society : The rapid growth of ICTs is resulting in an explosion of information creation, sharing and storing. Information is increasingly being recognised as a vital social resource, an important means and an end of production. It is believed that this has caused a shift from an 'industrial society' to an 'information society'.

Internet : The Internet is simply a network of computers and networks across the world, which uses the TCP-IP 'Transmission Control Protocol - Internet Protocol' for sharing information via electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. Internet is supported by the convergence of audio-visual and telephone networks with computer networks.

Mind Maps :  A mind map is a visual representation of ideas and concepts. It is a thinking tool that helps the user visually organise and structure information around a concept (or a word), and mind maps are useful for planning, thinking creatively, problem solving etc.. There are software applications that are available to create and edit digital mind maps .  eg 'Freemind'

Open Education Resources: Open educational resources (OERs) are freely accessible resources, with open formats and under open licenses  that are useful for teaching, learning, education, assessment and research purposes. OER is to content, what FOSS is to software – allowing for free access, use, modification and sharing.

Open document formats

Open document formats are those which are not privately owned /proprietary, and are under a public ownership. Eg .odt for text, .ods for spreadsheet, .odp for presentations, .ogg and ogv for audio and video files. Government of India has issued a policy supporting the use of documents that conform to open standards.

Social-Networking Service: On-line platforms or web sites that facilitates the building of social relationships (virtual), among people who share common personal, professional interests or are known to each other in real-life, are known as social networking services. Orkut, Facebook, Twitter , LinkedIn, MySpace are some of the common online social networking providers.    Social networking sites allow users to share ideas, activities, events, and interests within their individual networks.

Wikis : Wiki is a free software used to enable collaborative writing on the web. Wikipedia is one of the well known on-line encyclopedias that includes not any single expert voice, but the collective voices of many on any particular topic. English Wikipedia has the largest number of articles – 4.5 million  as of June  2014. The Kannada Wikipedia (http://kn.wikipedia.org) has less than 20,000 articles, and can grow only from contributions made by Kannada scholars and enthusiasts. The Karnataka Open Educational Resources (KOER) which is a OER portal of, for and by Karnataka school teachers, uses Wiki software.

World wide web (www) – this is one of the services (though the most popular) that runs on the Internet, consisting of inter-linked web pages, which is accessible using a software called a web browser (eg. Firefox) and a protocol (technical method) called the hyper text transfer protocol (http). The world wide web allows information to be stored and shared in the form of 'web pages', which are themselves 'hyper-linked' to other web-pages, creating a seamless mode of navigating the Internet.