SO, EXACTLY WHERE AM I, and precisely what am I doing? Funny you should ask because I was going to tell you anyhow. I’m teaching.

It’s currently Thursday morning and I’m sitting in a Stevenson Hall computer lab at SSU an hour early so I could begin this column before the stampede of 25 kids pour in and log in to learn cartoon making and animation design all week long.

I had my share of teacher melancholy when I retired as of July 1. This one-week per year contract I have with SSU’s Children Excel Program puts me back in the classroom doing what I like best — playing while teaching how to harness computers and the Internet to do as we tell them. We’re here to become masters of the machines.

The syllabus in a nutshell is that we visit a flexible dozen websites that let us create multimedia projects. We create them. Then we learn how to build a quick, easy Weebly website where we can display our projects. We put on a show for parents on Friday. Then I come home.

In the meantime, I’m set up at the DoubleTree downtown, compliments of the campus. My balcony overlooks the pool. Cotati and Rohnert Park are just outside the door. Mostly I cool my heels on the balcony in the evenings and partake of the hotel food. I’ve been doing this weekly gig since 2003. I’ve been to enough local eateries. Now I recline.

Traditionally, Susan comes for two days in the middle and we whoop it up and go clubbing and dancing and eating fine meals.

It’s late afternoon now. Susan is currently, patiently, sitting on the balcony waiting for me to finish writing. Then we are stepping out, y’all. She found a country bar that I’ve driven past a hundred times called the Twin Oaks Tavern with nightly live music. Tonight is open mic.

“I want to be a cowboy. And you can be my cow girl.”

It’s important that kids sharpen their technology skills. Those ones and zeros are evermore a prevailing presence in our lives. We must conquer these airwaves just like baby birds. It means survival.

Core skills include file management, online collaboration, Web 2.0 integration, and sharing techniques. If I tried to teach these essential skills directly — ha — if I wrote them on the board as our Key Topics for the Day, I’d get a room full of bored, glazed-over kids wearing dull expressions.

Shhh. Don’t tell, but we’re learning all that critical, important, essential-skill stuff in the background quietly while the Topics on the Board in giant letters and multi-colors read: Making Cartoons, Music Videos, Talking Avatars, and Stop-Action Animation. It sure looks like a menu of fun, and it is. I make it so. I come to class each day wearing a straw hat, a new daily Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and sandals. I’m Mr. Happy and I loudly remind them repeatedly that it’s summertime. No formal learning allowed. No work. Only playing and having fun is authorized. Once I have them convinced, we learn essential skills all week long.

I’ve got two classes, two age levels — little and littler — and we basically do the same activities, but I couch it differently and the older kids get more done.

Yes, we make cartoons, animations, and multimedia projects and host them on our own websites, and the kids are creative and funny and pleased with their final products. The artistic expression gives a deep inner satisfaction that drives the whole process.

However, to build multimedia requires media, so much file gathering takes place. I host libraries of zipped files and they download them, pictures, sounds, videos. Students must create personal folder structures, unzip my collections of files, move specific files to appropriate sub-folders on the hard drives. When that’s done, they upload the whole folder structure to their cloud-based Google Drives. Now they have my entire open-source multimedia file collection for life.

Each kid on Monday joined Google, created a new account, went to Google Drive, created a folder with their name and shared it with me. When kids do that, they never again need to share a file. Just drop it in the shared folder. I then share a folder with them all full of my goodies.

The kids didn’t realize it, but I’d just set them up the exact same way I set up my BHS classes for years, and the same way I teach teachers to design their Google classrooms when I’m over teaching adults at Touro University. I’m prepping them from both ends. For these kids, they were just excited to get a free collection of sound effects and funny pictures.

What keeps me coming back now for my 12th year is that teaching multimedia requires me to stay fresh on what’s cool and cutting edge in educational technology. BHS only wanted me to teach English, which I also love, but teaching technology has long been my pent-up passion. My only opportunities to teach it were with Touro and SSU, so I’m staying with them both.

I retired my body, but my brain seeks employment.

Steve Gibbs teaches at Benicia High School and has written a column for The Herald since 1985.