"What ONE valuable thing could I teach kids in my classroom that would have the potential of staying with them for the rest of their lives?"

This was the fundamental question that I asked myself when I first started to teach computer literacy at the middle school level several years ago. After working for a couple of large technology companies in the past, I have a pretty good idea as far as what skills are useful (and marketable) in a real world setting. Three things that I didn't want to do:

1. Bore a kid to death.
2. Give a kid busy work on the computer that would keep little Johnny occupied, but would have him learn absolutely nothing.
3. Have little Johnny walk out of my classroom more confused than when he came in. (IMHO, the worst of the three.)

"Why not HTML?"

The more this thought marinated in my head, the better it seemed. It had several things going for it:

• The kids could see their results immediately, resulting in instant positive feedback.
• I didn't have to bug school administrators about buying pricey software.
• HTML teaches attention to detail in that, if something is incorrectly coded, things can go haywire real quick. This basically forces kids to concentrate.
• All the software necessary to create a web page is already on a computer with a Windows operating system. Kids could actually go home and do this in front of their mom and dad!

The final major barrier had something to do with the terminology of HTML. I found out that this is probably the main thing that scares away a lot of grown-ups, let alone kids, from learning HTML. The solution was to replace several bits of terminology with kindergarten language, so that anybody could understand! In essence, nestled tags (Huh??) became "sandwiches", end tags became "stop signs", etc.

It worked.

The middle schoolers had no problem creating their first web page! This was followed by the students coloring backgrounds, coloring letters, making letters dance across the screen, and a bunch of other things -while having a ball doing it! You could sense the pride of accomplishment and rising self esteem engulf the whole computer class! The kids in my classroom were delighfully amazed and fully cognizant of the fact that they were learning something, at the middle school level, that a lot of students in college were not learning!

It was a beautiful thing to witness.

After a couple of years of successfully teaching kids HTML, I thought to myself, "If I were to put this in DVD format, not only the kids that come through my classroom will be blessed, but kids across the United States and the whole world would be blessed as well!" After months of writing a script in Starbucks, hiring a production company (Big Powerful Media), getting two kids to participate in the production, and a lot of grace/mercy/favor of God, the DVD "Web Design for Kids (...and Curious GrownUps!)" came into being.

The response to the DVD from parents across the United States (especially from the homeschooling community), has been nothing short of overwhelming. Having parents call or email you out of the blue to talk about how this product has blessed and enriched their children's lives always reinforces the fact that this DVD is way bigger than what I initially thought it would turn out to be. To the many people who have invested their hard earned currency in purchasing the DVD, in the name of education, for the sake of their kid, somebody else's kid, or for the sake of a curious grownup, I say thank you! I pray that this product will allow whoever watches it to learn a skill that will pay dividends for the rest of their lives.