What is the web? Part 2

Demystifying the World Wide Web and the Internet is definitely one of the core goals for student learning this year in the Intro to IT class.  Students are now using the web every day in their daily lives, but to many of them the following ideas are not apparent:

1. Computers can be connected to each other using either wired or wireless (through the air like a radio) connection to share information (data).
2. We say the computers are networked when they are thus connected and call all the computers connected together a network.
3. The Internet is a global network of networks, allowing computers all over the world to share data with each other.
4. The World Wide Web (or simply "the Web") is a collection of programs and data sharing rules that run on top of the Internet.

There are so many new and unfamiliar notions here that "demystifying the Web" is a year long goal.

Today I plan to have students learn how to use their Google Docs accounts to upload and link a TurtleArt file from a document.   The activity they will be completing is here.  Uploading and downloading are two very important concepts.  To make sense of what is happening, they need to become comfortable with the notion that they have a computer in front of them (the "local" computer) and they can transfer documents and other data to their Google Docs accounts, which are located "out there" somewhere on the Internet.