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When talking with students, computer coordinators, or anyone technical, we often confront a language barrier. They use terms that we don't fully understand, especially acronyms that have arisen recently and may not appear in the dictionary on your desk. This week's article provides an acronym alphabet of some of the most recent acronyms likely to appear in the life of a technology-using teacher.

AAC: Advanced Audio Codec. A new technology for compressing music files that's used in the Apple iPod and iTunes. Many say it will replace MP3. See http://www.vialicensing.com/products/mpeg4aac/standard.html

BBEdit: BBEdit. A program used by HTML programmers to create Web pages. The rest of us use WYSIWYG programs such as Dreamweaver.

CD-ROM: Compact Disc Read-Only Memory. An optical storage medium for computer data, that your computer can read from, but not write to. Most software today that is not downloaded from the Web is delivered on CD-ROM. (They are round and silver.)

DHTML: Dynamic HTML. Language used to program Web pages that change based on what the user does, using style sheets and scripts. Not for the faint of heart.

.EXE: Executable. Filename extension used for application programs in the Windows operating system. Many viruses often arrive unwanted with this moniker. Never open an .exe file whose provenance you doubt.

FTP: File Transfer Protocol. A system for transferring files over the Internet, used most often to move files between your computer and a server.

GIF: Graphics Interchange Format. Pronounced with a hard G. Not peanut butter. A filename extension for graphics files compressed in this standard format.

HTML: Hyper Text Markup Language. Coding used in web pages. Geeks write it directly; the rest of us use web-page editors that write the HTML for us.

IP: Internet Protocol. Without it there'd be no Internet, no World Wide Web. It's the standard syntax used to assemble and manage the packets of data that send information back and forth across the net.

JPEG: Joint Photographer Expert Group. A system for compressing image data, especially photographs. As a filename extension, it appears as .jpg. Your digital camera uses JPEG compression. If you have any doubts about what format to send a picture in this is the one.

K: Kilo. Greek for thousand. A kilobit is a thousand bits of data. A Kilobyte is a thousand bytes, bytes consisting of eight to ten bits, depending on who's counting.

LAN: Local Area Network. The network that connects the computers together in your office or school, or maybe even at home. Can be wireless or cabled, most commonly using Ethernet.

MP3: MPEG audio layer 3. A scheme for compressing music files. MPEG stands for Motion Picture Expert Group, which designed this method originally for use in compressing digital video.

NAT: Network Address Translating. Since every computer on the Internet needs its own unique IP address, and there are not enough addresses to go around, NAT is used in many LAN's to allow more computers to be online, by translating the LAN's address through to the individual computers.

OS X: Operating System X (Ten). The software that performs the basic operations on the new Apple Macintosh computers. based on the Unix operating system, OS X and Linux are the leading (and growing and relatively virus-free) competitors to the Windows operating system from Microsoft.

PNG: Portable Network Graphics. A scheme for compressing image files, most often seen as a filename extension. Though all the new browsers can handle .png files, they are not used as much as .gif and .jpg images.

QWERTY: Not really an acronym, it's what American keyboards are called. French keyboards are called AZERTY. Look on your keyboard and you will see why. But the other widely-used method of laying out the keys, Dvorak, puts AOEUI on the middle row.

RTSP: Real Time Streaming Protocol. A syntax for arranging the data in packets and managing their passage over the Internet, used for video and audio streaming such as QuickTime and RealVideo. Since it uses UDP packets, some school firewalls block RTSP streams.

SMTP: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. The system of arranging and tracking packets of data in email messages that travel across the internet. Your emails are sent by, and received by, an SMTP server.

T1: Telecommunications 1 megabit. A way of describing the bandwidth of a communications connection. If your school is connected to the Internet with a T1 line, you can pass more data more quickly than a school with a cable modem or ISDN line.

UDP: User-Defined Protocol. Yet another method for arranging and managing data packets that flow across the internet, this one open to a variety of syntaxes. UDP packets are often used for streaming audio and video, such as RTSP.

VR: Virtual Reality. Not what a philosopher might think, VR refers to a wide range of technologies that attempt to produce the perception of the real world through representations of digital data. Often used to describe three-dimensional applications such as QuickTime VR.

WYSIWYG: What You See Is What You Get. Often used to describe page-layout or web-page editing programs that display on the editing screen a facsimile of what the user will see. Dreamweaver is a WYSIWYG (pronounced wizzywig) program.

XML: eXtensible Markup Language. Like HTML, a coding system for designing web pages. In XML, you define your own tags, and can adjust them to display differently depending on the way the data is used.

Y2K: Year 2 Kilo. Shorthand to refer to the year 2000, when we all feared our computers would crash because we now needed four instead of two digits to represent the year. You will still find software labeled Y2K compliant. Did your computer survive?

ZIP: Zipped file, or Zip disk. The first is a filename extension used to denote files that have been compressed using the Zip method. The second is a type of disk storage, commonly called a Zip disk.

These 26 are just a start at learning the jargon of technology. You can learn hundreds more at the high-Tech Dictionary at http://www.computeruser.com/resources/dictionary/, or the FOLDOC (Free Online Dictionary of Computing) at http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/