My class has about fifty computers in it, mostly older Apple G3s, but I am in the process of getting some newer ones. A few of my students decided that they would like to experiment with networked gaming, so they asked me if they could bring in a couple of their own computers and set them up. I said, "Sure."

William of Ockham was a fourteenth-century logician and Franciscan friar in England. He came up with the lex parsimoniae, or the law of succinctness, which says entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity. Occam's razor, as it came to be known, states that when given two equally valid explanations for a phenomenon, one should embrace the less complicated. Or, as architect Mies van der Rohe famously said, "Less is more."

At its inception, computing was about machines, applied science, and nerds. It was a world for nonsocial shut-ins who existed in front of their home-built computers, fiendishly writing code to make the machine do something.

I've been migrating most of my files to the Web. I use my class Web site instead of a file cabinet, and I post family pictures to my personal Web site.

I teach art, and I use technology to do it. I want my kids to be able to think creatively about a problem and then choose the most appropriate tech to solve it.

I was telling my brother about some of my digital video students. I told him how they were really creative, and that they were taking to editing like ducks to water.

Every semester, I reformat my classroom computers to get old junk off and update the applications. A couple semesters ago, I decided to leave iChat (Apple's instant messaging application) active, although I did not put the icon on the desktop, nor did I tell the kids.

I'm about to begin the fall semester at Hollywood High School, in Hollywood, California, on July 5.

At the beginning of this school year, two students were put into my Digital Production class that really didn't belong there.

Marc Prensky has coined the phrase "digital natives."