ICT uses outside of College.

Because i am also studying Graphics and Art, i have to use sftware to produce images. At home i have CorelDraw X4 Graphics suite, Photoshop CS3 and Paintsho Pro 8.

Learning to use there different pieces of software is useful for my courses and helps me develop ICT skills.

It has also helped me design graphics for my Module 2 work on my E-Portfolio coming up with a logo, banner and buttons.

I also tried to re-new my Xbox live subsription with a month but the wireless adapter couldn't be detected.

Online Banking...

Today i looked at online banking to see how it works, and if it is faster and easier than going into an actual bank.

I have looked at 2 websites for banks,

The Abbey National - http://www.abbey.com/csgs/Satellite?pagename=Abbey/GSDistribuidora/GS_Home

NatWest - http://www.natwest.com/personal.ashx

The purpose of Online banking is to save the customers time, if they need to pay bills etc they can log onto their computer and pay then quickly rather than talking to someone on a phone for 20 minutes or going into the actual bank and quueing up for ages.

There are security risks involved with online banking, a keylogger could pick up your card details, card holder name etc. Also the website could be a fake, made to look the same as your banks website but when you enter your details the fraudulant webites owner will recive your details.

The target audiences of Online banking, i believe, are students and young adults, people who have beenn brought up using the internet. Also Businessmen who do not have the time to spare going into banks all the time can quickly and effeciantly do their banking in their office, without moving from their chair.

NatWest fufills its purpose of their target audiences because as seen on their home page, they offer free rail cards for students wgo apply for a student account. This will draw more students to the bank as they will be able to travel cheaply on trains back to their family / university when they please.

NatWest also have a page specificly for Businesses: http://www.natwest.com/business.ashx

This shows that NatWest also cater for their second target market by offering a service dedicated to Businesses and their finances.

Abbey on the other hand doesnt seem to offer much, just the standard banking. This shows that Abbey targets civilians and the general population rather than certain minorities. But still this attracts a lot of people who just want simple banking without all the extra accounts etc.

Benefits of online banking are that it is easily accessable to anyone with interenet acesss, and people who dont have interent at home can go to the local library and use their computers, most of the time for free. It is quick and easy and means that less people are travelling to their local bank, thus saving fuel and helping the ecomonmy.

Disadvantages are, as stated before, that not everyone has internet acess and may have to travel to use the internet, which means why may as well just travel to their local bank. There is also a lot of information to remember, i.e logins / passwords / secret questions and answers. If the user writes this infomation down and then it gets lost / stolen they cannot acess their online account and someone may use it to acess their bank online.

Online banking could improve in the future by being more secure, the major issue is identity fraud. Most people are worried that their information can be tracked on the internet and someone will gain use of their personal account and this money. Going into a real bank with ID and credit cards is a more sure way of identifying somone than having to trust that the person hasn't just found out someone elses's details to log into the online account.

APart from security issues and lack of internet to some people, Online banking is a useful and acessable tool avalible to anyone who has a bank account and the interent.

eBay!

Because of all the blocking procedures our IT class have to use the Irish eBay.

http://www.ebay.ie/

eBay is a tool on the internet, more of a 'online shop'. It is used to auction items. The user places a bit by entering an amount in a text box. The amount has to be higher than the current bid. The last person to bid the highest wins the item and must continue through the payment methods, most likely PayPal and the seller will recive the money and post the item.

eBay uses Paypal, and a variety of other payment methos that are safe and secure so that the auctions go smoothly, even though the buyer may be in another country.

The Navigation bar displayed is a useful tool to guide customers around the site and help them to find the items they wish to bid on. The search function can hone down on specific items that the user looks for. The Catagories can help the user browse through a certain genre of items, i.e Cloths or books.

This is the category bar, it lists different genres of items such as clothes and books.

This is useful for the user to browse through a certain type of item if they are not sure what they want.

Clicking a genre will take you to a new page where only the certain type of item the user selected will be displayed.

eBay has sites for nearly every country:
Argentina Australia Austria Belgium Brazil Canada China France Germany Hong Kong India Ireland Italy Korea Malaysia Mexico Netherlands New Zealand Philippines Poland Singapore Spain Sweden Switzerland Taiwan Thailand Turkey United Kingdom United States Vietnam

This is a good idea as it opens up the consumer market from western countries to a global market.

Also certian items are only avalible in certain countries so this may stop illegal items being put up on eBay.

5 Day Weather Forecast

Using the BBC website i found the tool that can tell the user the weathe rin their area of 5 days.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/5day.shtml?id=3146

This tool is useful and means you don't have to wait for the news to come on to see the weather.

Journey to Tottenham Court, London.

I planned a trip from home to Tottenham Court in London using the AA Route Finder - www.theaa.com



I typed in my home postcode and then the road name, Tottenham Court, into the route finder.

It came up with written directions and a map. It told me the total miles and time, the total time was 2 hours 10 minutes.



The program also told me where all the speed cameras and Rest stops are, i.e Holiday inn.



Knowing it will take just over 2 hours to drive there i decided to check the train timetables to see wether it would be cheaper and faster to take the train instead of driving.



I looked at Southwestern Trains' website - http://www.southwesttrains.co.uk/ - and looked at the timetable from Portsmouth Harbours' Station:



http://www.southwesttrains.co.uk/SWTrains/pdfs/ttApril08/PTT17Apr08.pdf



the trip was planned for 11:30 so i looked at the 11:45 train to Waterloo. Unfortunatly the timetable didn't show the estimated time of arrival..

Interent tools i've used recently... & the Digital Divide.

Used the internet to play WoW an MMORPG

Used MSN, an IM service to chat to friends

Used 'Google' search engine

Used Forums

----------------------------------------------

The Digital Divide:

The Digital divide is the diefference bewteen the world, countries and even people. It is a the gap of knowledge of ICT and other such things.

For example nearly everyone in Britain has a home computer that has acess to theinterent.
In contrast, Africa doesnt have electricity in most of the country, let alone home computers and internet. The digital divide between Africa and Britain is therfore great.

Also older generations who did not have digital media when growing up dont tend to learn to use them. Compared to teenager at the moment who are brought up using computers can use most media and so the digital divide between younger and older generations is quite large too.

Here is some more information about the subject:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_divide

Reflection...

Todays lesson in ICT was to find out about instant and text messageing.
We looked at the advantages and disadvantages.

We used SMS on our Mobile Phones to create a 'text language' Haiku and send it to class mates for them to translate.

SMS messages are meant to be short so a new language has evolved to cater for the small amount of space. Great = Gr8 etc..

This is becuase texts have alimited amount of space ( 180 characters average ) and people want to be able to fit as much in as possible.

SMS is fast and easy but can cost a lot.

Instant messaging is also good as the chat is fast and there is no limit to what you can send, it is also free. The only downside is that the person you want to talk to needs to online running the IM program to be able to talk to them.

Text Haiku -.-'

Ryn lvs man bm bm
he tinks its alot of fn
give him bm bm bm


Ryan loves man bum bum
the thinks its a lot of fun
give him bum bum bum

Created by Louis 'Cheesy balls' Gale
Ryan
and Dodds

FIrst Post

First post...