Terms 

What are the 7 competencies of digital literacy? 

• Identity & Wellbeing, Discovery, Evaluation, Ethics, Creation & Scholarship, Communication & Collaboration, Curation. (Virigina Tech, 2026)

Search Query 

• A word or other term used to electronically retrieve data, web pages, or other information from files, databases, etc. (Dictionary.com, 2026)

Natural Language Query

• A business intelligence technology that allows users to ask questions in simple, everyday language and receive quick insights from their data. (Lansa, 2026)

Spider (as related to the World Wide Web)

• A computer program that follows and catalogs links within websites in order to index web pages for a search engine. (Dictionary.com, 2026)

Digital Footprint

• One's unique set of digital activities, actions, and communications that leave a data trace on the internet or on a computer or other digital device and can identify the particular user or device. (Dictionary.com, 2026)

What are the 5 basic computer components?

• A Motherboard, a central processing unit (CPU), a graphics processing Unit (GPU), random access memory (RAM), and storage (HDD or SSD). (ID Tech, 2024)

What is a file as it relates to computers?

• A collection of related data or program records stored on some input/output or auxiliary storage medium. (Dictionary.com, 2026)

File Extension

• A suffix added to the name of a file to indicate the file's layout, in terms of how the data within the file is organized. (Sheldon, 2023)

Zip File

• A container that can house multiple files, as many as you like. And as the zip format uses compression, the zip file itself will be smaller, and take up less storage, than the sum of the files inside. (Williams, 2024)

Saas (Software as a Service)

• A cloud-based software delivery model in which providers host applications and make them available to users over the internet. (China, 2025)

Digital Bubble

• A phenomenon that limits an individual’s exposure to a full spectrum of news and other information on the internet by algorithmically prioritizing content that matches a user’s demographic profile and online history or excluding content that does not. (Dictionary.com, 2026)

Generative AI

• Artificial intelligence is designed to process prompts from users and respond with text, images, audio, or other output that is modeled on a training data set. (Dictionary.com, 2026)

Prompt (as related to AI)

• To request particular output from (a machine learning algorithm) by means of instructions, questions, examples, context, or other input. (Dictionary.com, 2026)

What is the difference between the Internet and the WWW?

The Internet is the global infrastructure of interconnected computer networks, cables, and hardware, while the World Wide Web (WWW) is a system of interlinked hypertext documents (websites) accessed through the internet using browsers. (Miller, 2016)

Browser

• A software program that allows the user to find and read encoded documents in a form suitable for display, especially such a program for use on the internet. (Dictionary.com, 2026)

URL (Uniform Resource Locator)

• An address that identifies a particular file on the internet, usually consisting of the protocol, as http, followed by the domain name. (Dictionary.com, 2026)