Information Communication Technology Essay

Where ever you go you always see ICT whether it’s at the cinema or at a bank, it has become a necessity in modern life. This report I will be writing, will be on the way I do activities at home and at school using ICT (Information Communication Technology). It will also show what I am able to do on a daily basis, as a result of information technology products, such as my homework, socialising with my friends, playing games and much more. The three ICT technologies I will discussing are: * Mobile Phones * E-Mail * USB Mass Storage Systems (Pen Drive, Flash Memory Cards) The Mobile Phone A mobile phone was originally invented for long range communication through a portable, electronic device, but nowadays, as technology progressed the mobile phone, not allows me to make calls to people from long ranges, but it also allows me to use SMS (Short Messaging System) which means I can send messages to others without direct need for speech. I am also able to access a variety of files such as image, video and music. Mobile phones work by the use of a Subscriber Identity Module Card or SIM Card. It holds a microchip and is inserted into the handset allowing you access to a certain mobile phone network depending on who your provider is. This network is made up of a series of base stations that send signals used by mobile phones. The area covered by each of these base stations is called a cell and cells overlap to make up a coverage area. Advantages There are many advantages to having a mobile phone such as: * You are able to communicate with others through SMS, voice calls and even video calls for any reason and vice versa. * You are able to carry media files on your phone for entertainment purposes. * Nowadays many mobile phones allow you to access the Internet through WAP (Wireless Application Protocol), GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), Wi-Fi (although a disadvantage to Wi-Fi is that you need to be within range of a wireless network connected to the Internet) * The mobile phone can be used almost anywhere without the need for landline cables etcetera Disadvantages Along with advantages there are also some disadvantages such as: * Firstly, it is much more expensive to use than a landline and charges vary when calling other networks. * Also, providers have different numbers of base stations meaning that some providers would a larger coverage area than others so you wouldn’t be able to use your phone everywhere. * Mobile phones aren’t able to get any reception in some buildings that have no direct access to the outdoors e.g. windows and also when you are underground. * Also when one base station has too many people connected to it, it can sometimes disconnect your call. Personal Needs When it comes to using my phone personally, I use it to make phone calls to my family to let them know where I am or when I will back home. It is a way that my parents can ensure that I am safe and it is also a connection if there is any emergency and they need to contact me. Also I am able to listen to music through the music player. How the technology meets my Personal Needs My personal needs are met by this technology; it allows me to communicate with my family while I am not around with them. I can call any of my contacts which are saved in my contact list, by accessing the database of contacts on my mobile phone. By pressing certain buttons (input) different menus come up, in this case my contact list (outcome). This is done by the phone’s CPU (Central Processing Unit), it starts to process the information received by pressing certain buttons and gives the outcome of whatever buttons I have pressed, for example by me opening my contact list and I can find relevant numbers that I can use to contact my family for example my mother’s contact details, it gives me the phone numbers available for me to contact her, from there I can choose the required number I want to call then the mobile phone starts to connect to it and will send a request to the other phone for my call to be accepted or rejected depending on the person. Also when I am going to and from school, doing homework, going out or any other reason, I am able to listen to music while I do the activity. It allows me to pass time more quickly if I am getting bored and sometimes helps me to concentrate while I do work. Evaluate Personal Needs I can use this technology very well to meet my personal needs as I am able to communicate with my family cheaply through the use of SMS and voice calls. But as you go on and need to use your phone more you find that it is too expensive to use the phone but those needs are met by the use of contracts where you receive various numbers of free texts and voice calls for a set price per month. This makes it not only cheaper but easier to contact family because I do not need to worry about having large bills to pay out. Social Needs I need to use my phone for social reasons so that I can communicate with my friends and organise certain activities such as parties. I also need to be able to send and receive SMS messages. How the technology meets my social needs I need to be able to contact my friends, on a regular basis and at short notice, while I am out and about. I am able to do this due to the services provided by a mobile phone, it lets you make calls and send SMSs. My friends would call me to ask if I am able to come to certain arrangements, just as I would call or use SMS to see whether or not they are allowed to come to some events. Even if, for any reason, I am unable to accept a voice/video call from my friends they are still able to contact me through voicemail where they can save a message that I can check later on and get back to them. Also with SMS if my phone is turned off I will still receive the SMS as soon as I turn my phone back on. I can, not only communicate, but I can also share files with my friends through the use of Bluetooth or Infrared. I am able to send them music, images, videos or games quickly and effectively, anywhere. Evaluate Social Needs The mobile phone technology is excellent at meeting my social needs because it allows me make and receive calls and text messages and also share files with my friends. To further meet my needs it could better itself in the way you have to share files, you are unable to send a group of files at one given time but instead you need to accept each file you would like to receive after the previous file has been sent. School Needs As it is against school rules to have a mobile phone with you during school hours, there would be only one need for a mobile phone at school, and that is to secretly send messages to other pupils about various things. How the technology meets my School Needs I need to be able to send messages to my friends during school hours discreetly and I am able to do this because of the different sound settings the phone has. You are able to put your phone on ‘vibrate’ or ‘silent’ so that the teacher cannot tell that I am using my phone. I can also use the mass storage system from inbuilt memories or external memory cards to save/ transfer files from home to school and vice versa. Evaluate School Needs Thanks to the ‘silent’/’vibrate’ settings I can send text messages without getting caught but the level of vibration is sometimes too much and can be heard and by putting it on silent you wouldn’t realise you received a text and you would have to keep on checking and that could potentially get you caught, so by being able to set the vibration intensity I would be able to be more discreet and attract less attention when I receive a text. E(lectronic) Mail E-mail is a system for sending and receiving messages electronically over a computer network, through modems using telephone lines, or, through wireless transmissions to anybody around the world who has access to a computer and has their own personal e-mail address. Examples of messengers are: yahoo messenger, windows live hotmail, g-mail. In an e-mail you can send notes, letters and most kinds of files – music, image video, word processing and others. To send e-mails you first need an email address this consists of five parts; * Firstly, the username (e.g. john_smith), this refers to the recipient’s mailbox. * Then there is a â€Å"@† sign. * Thirdly you have the host name (hotmail, yahoo etcetera) this refers to the mail server this is mainly the company name. * The host name is followed by a dot â€Å".† * It is then completed by the domain (com, co.uk, gov.uk etcetera) Advantages There are many advantages to e-mail such as: * You can use e-mail at any time of the day and it will be sent to the preferred destination. * It is much quicker than by post – snail mail and you can ensure that it doesn’t get lost because it doesn’t have to go through the process of sorting. * It’s free to use. * It can be sent to anyone around the world so long as they have an Internet connection. * You can send messages to large numbers of people Disadvantages Along with the advantages there are also disadvantages to e-mail such as: * You can’t ensure you will get an instant reply because the receiver might not check his mail until later * You are subject to getting spam * There is less security as third parties are able to retrieve your email address * Not always suitable for serious business documents or transactions requiring signatures. Personal Needs I need to be able to contact my family via e-mail at any time of the day as I have family abroad and it is a free way of communicating to them instead of wasting a lot of money in making international calls. Also I need to be able to send some files to myself if I ever need to. For example music files. How the technology meets my Personal Needs With e-mail I am able to contact my family abroad or if they are at work on a regular basis. E-mail is a free type of mail which can be network based or web based or on a certain computer. If an email address is based on the web then it can be accessed from any computer that has an Internet connection but an email that is based on a certain computer or network can only be accessed from that computer or any computer which is connected to the network. Using Email is much more efficient and easier for me because to be able to contact my family without the use of a telephone makes it cheaper to use because e-mail is free. Evaluate Personal Needs My personal needs are met very well by the use of e-mail due to me being able to contact my family anywhere in the world very quickly and at no extra cost this makes my life easier and also better in the sense I have more money, because I don’t need to spend money making international calls and instead use e-mail I am able to save money to get the same message across. Ways that e-mail can be made better are that it should automatically detect spam mailings and delete them and to make matters better for everyone who holds an e-mail address, hosts like hotmail and yahoo should not allow third parties to have access to our information. Social Needs I need to use e-mail to contact my friends when I am unable to call/text them. It is an alternate way for me communicate with my friends if I ever need to talk to them about certain matters. How the technology meets my Social Needs Instead of the phone to communicate I can use e-mail or the more instant version IM, Instant Messaging, which is absolutely free to use. IM is when I am able to communicate with friends and family through different chat rooms. Windows Live Messenger, for example allows me to talk to friends and family when, the person I wish to speak to, and I are online at the same time it is similar to using the phone but the main difference is you are not talking but instead you are typing. I can arrange to meet up with people to go to the cinema or Brent Cross whenever I please I can also just generally talk with my friends about things that are going on at school etcetera. It allows my friends to talk to me if ever the need anything. Many IM servers allow you to play games with your friends like tic-tac-toe or poker I take advantage of this feature and play the games with many of my friends. The use of e-mail and IM, socially, means hassles like friends arriving at place too early or late can be avoided because we can tell each quickly and simply through this technology. Evaluate Social Needs E-mail and IM meets my needs for social uses very well because I am able to converse with my friends and family and arrange events like going to the cinema with great ease. I don’t have to go through the process of phoning different people at different times and spending money on calls, I can just go on an IM server and talk to all the necessary people at the same time and in one conversation making it more like speaking to them in person. Ways it can be improved to meet my social needs are that it should be more easily accessed, you should be able to use these IM services on your mobile phone for free so you don’t need to be on a computer all the time. School Needs I can use e-mail to help me with my school work as I am able to send work-related files to myself and then access them at home and vice versa. How this technology meets me School Needs People who do not have their own external mass storage device, for any reason, can take advantage of using e-mail to send work. On many occasions I have forgotten to bring my USB Pen Drive to school but I that hasn’t stopped me from being able to take my work home with me. Thanks to e-mail I am able to send necessary files to myself so I can complete that work at home. Also my friends are able to send me files which can aid me in doing my homework via e-mail. I can also send my coursework files to relevant subject teachers for them to mark and give back, this means I do not have to waste time in trying to track down the teachers but they can receive it successfully without it being lost through e-mail. I have known people who have asked other teachers to give the coursework to their teacher and had it lost and others who have sent their work directly to the teacher’s e-mail address this is more efficient because that way you can be sure that it won’t get lost. Evaluate School Needs I am able to use e-mail to meet my school needs very well. I can send work to myself so I can continue to do the work at home. This is very good because a lot of the ICT syllabus requires doing work, not only at school, but a lot at home as well and people like me who, on a regular basis forget to bring their USB Pen Drive to school, can benefit the use of e-mail to send work home. Ways that it could be improved to meet my school needs are that it should allow you to send whole files at the same time, because currently it only allows me to send any number of files but it has to be done all separately, this is very time consuming as I have to upload each individual file into an attachment and then I have to download each file onto the computer when I get home . By allowing you to send a whole file at once it saves much more time and hassle. USB Pen Drive – Flash Memory USB Pen Drives are portable, external mass storage devices with a USB plug which can transfer files from one USB supporting machine to another. These are ideally suited to people who have a large number of documents that require frequent access in different places. The memory capacity of these devices has been increasing steadily over the last few years due to advances in technology. The first mass storage system started off only with a capacity of 32mb but nowadays we have USB Pen Drives ranging from 32 MB (megabytes) to 4 GB (gigabytes). USB (Universal Serial Bus) Pen Drives come in many different ways, you get the standard device which is used for storage only and then you get other devices which are mp3’s as well, so not only can you save important files on it you can also listen to music USB Flash Memory differs from hard drives because the Flash Memory stores the memory in a chip whereas hard drives store the memory in a disk Advantages There are advantages to having a USB Pen Drive such as: * They are supported by most operating systems, and can be directly attached to a hardware device. * It is portable and easy to transport as they are so small and compact. * You can transfer files from one computer/machine to another. * You can get different amount storage on them depending on the size and/or quantity of your files. * They can carry much more data than a floppy disk. * Nowadays they aren’t very expensive to buy. Disadvantages Just as there are advantages there are also disadvantages to USB Pen Drive such as: * You have a limited amount of storage – some files may be too big to hold in the USB Pen Drive or you may have too many files on it. * Files may get corrupted on the USB Pen Drive if it is faulty resulting in you losing your work * Due to the portability of it, it is very easy to lose track of it and you may find that you keep on misplacing it. * Some older technologies like old computers do not support USB ports meaning there is no use for the USB Pen Drive. Personal Needs I do not have much of a personal need for USB Pen Drives but sometimes I need to be able to transfer data from one place to another such as music files(mp3, wma), image files(jpg.), video files(wmv, mp4, mpeg). How the technology meets my Personal Needs With a USB Pen Drive I am able to move files to different destinations for example if one of my computers in the house is connected to the Internet and the other computer isn’t, I can download a file from the Internet and then transfer it to the other computer via USB. Evaluate Personal Needs USB Pen Drive meets my needs very well because I am able to transfer many files and folders at the same time to different systems that support USB Ports. Due to the large amounts of memory available to the ability to compress files you end up with a lot space for you to use. Social Needs Just as there are not many uses for USB Pen Drive personally, socially there are limited uses. The main social use for the USB Pen Drive is that you can share files with friends like music or images. How the technology meets my Social Needs If ever I need to go to my friend’s house and they need some files or I need to get some files from them, I am able to use a USB Pen Drive to transfer files. It is more efficient than using e-mail because you are able to transfer whole files and on e-mail you have limits to the size of the file you can send. Also I can access the files without the need of accessing the Internet. Evaluate Social Needs The USB Pen Drive meets my social needs very well because I can move files to any system at my friend’s house very easily. This is very helpful because some of my friends don’t have access to the Internet so I can use the USB Pen Drive to give them files. School Needs Unlike my social and personal needs there are many uses for the USB Pen Drive in school life. I am able to transfer files from school to my home and continue to do my work. How this technology meets my School Needs As an ICT GSCE student I need to be able to take coursework, data files and other various files to and from school, with a USB Pen Drive I can easily do that. With a 1GB flash memory drive I have no problem transferring files. Using a USB Pen Drive I don’t need to access the Internet, instead I can just plug it into the computer and it will detect the hardware and install the software to run the USB Pen Drive. When it has done that I can freely open up the USB Pen Drive files from ‘My Computer’ and ‘drag and drop’ necessary files. I can carry on doing work at home and complete it to give in to the teacher the next day it is better than having to wait until the next lesson to complete the work. Evaluate School Needs The USB Pen Drive meets my school needs extremely well; thanks to it I can send/transfer files to any computer I need to complete my school work. This is very useful because some computers may not have the program/software to support the necessary file so being able to move files via USB Pen Drive is helpful because then I can move it to a computer that does have the software. Ways to make the USB Pen Drive better in meeting my school needs are that you should be able to upgrade your USB Pen Drive to have a larger space for memory instead of having to buy a new one.