Computer Application

At the end of the course, the students should be able to: 1. explain the concept and scope of information technology; 2. describe the basics of information processing and information transmission; 3. appreciate the methods of computer organisation; 4. demonstrate knowledge of various components of the computer; and 5. apply practical knowledge of computer operations.

Content (theory): concept and scope of information technology, Computers for information storage, information seeking, and information processing and information transmission. Elements of computer system, computer hardware and software. Numeric data, alpha numeric data. Contents of a program and processing. Computer organisation, block diagram of a computer, CPU, memory. Input devices. Keyboard, mouse and many others. output devices, VDU and Printer, Scanner and Plotter. Electrical requirements, inter-connections between units, connectors and cables. Secondary storage: magnetic disks – tracks and sectors, optical disk (CD and DVD Memory), primary and secondary memory: RAM, ROM, PROM and many others. Capacity; device controllers, serial port, parallel port, system bus. Exercises on file opening and closing. Memory management. Device management and input – output (I/O) management with respect of windows. Installation concept and precautions to be observed while installing the system and software. Introduction about Operating Systems such as MS-DOS and Windows. Special features, various commands of MS word and MS-Excel. About the internet – server types, connectivity (TCP/IP, shell). Applications of internet like: e-mail and browsing. Various Browsers like WWW (World Wide Web). Hyperlinks; HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol). FTP (File Transfer Protocol). Basics of Networking – LAN, WAN and Topologies. Practical: Given a PC, name its various components and list their functions. Identification of various parts of a computer and peripherals. Practice in installing a computer system by giving connection and loading the system software and application software. Installation of DOS and simple exercises on TYPE, REN, DEL, CD, MD, COPY, TREE, BACKUP commands. Exercises on entering text and data (Typing Practice). Installation of Windows 98 or 2000 and many others. Features of Windows as an operating system: Start, Shutdown and restore, Creating and operating on the icons, Opening closing and sizing the windows, Using elementary job commands like – creating, saving, modifying, renaming, finding and deleting a file, Creating and operating on a folder, Changing setting like, date, time color (back ground and fore ground), Using short cuts, Using on line help. MS-WORD: File Management: Opening, creating and saving a document, locating files, copying contents in some different file(s), protecting files, Giving password protection for a file, Page Set up: Setting margins, tab setting, ruler, indenting, Editing a document: Entering text, Cut, copy, paste using tool-bars, Formatting a document: Using different fonts, changing font size and colour, changing the appearance through bold/ italic/ underlined, highlighting a text, changing case, using subscript and superscript, using different underline methods: Aligning of text in a document, justification of document, Inserting bullets and numbering, Formatting paragraph, inserting page breaks and column breaks. Use of headers, footers: Inserting footnote, end note, use of comments, Inserting date, time, special symbols, importing graphic images, drawing tools, Tables and Borders. Creating a table, formatting cells, use of different border styles, shading in tables, merging of cells, and partition of cells, inserting and deleting a row in a table. Print preview, zoom, page set up, printing options, Using Find, Replace options, Using Tools like: Spell checker, help, use of macros, mail merge, thesaurus word content and statistics, printing envelops and labels. Using shapes and drawing toolbar, Working with more than one window in MS Word, How to change the version of the document from one window OS to another.