When they were babies, compact discs were phasing out audio cassettes. When they hit pre-school, the Internet came into widespread use. In elementary school, they learned how to surf that ‘Net while vying for the high scores in video games and watching Disney on DVD. In middle school, pagers and PC’s were part of daily life. In high school, cell phones with organizers, instant messaging and cameras were in every classroom.

In college, they can order books online, bring laptops to class and IM friends while on study breaks in the library.

This generation of students is as comfortable with computer screens as the pages of their textbooks — if not more so. As they go back to school, they’ll continue the seamless integration of technology into their lives.

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They’re known as Millennials — young adults whose gadgets are like appendages to them. They can’t imagine life without their cell phones, iPods, computers and being online. As the Pew Internet & American Life Project astutely observed, they are “digital natives in a land of digital immigrants.”

One such native, Samantha Wachtel, 17, a senior at Tamalpais High School in Marin County, Calif. does two things when she gets up every morning: checks her pink Razr for missed calls while she slept and she turns on her Dell computer. Before she leaves the house for school, she checks e-mail, MySpace, listens to iTunes, instant messages her friends and sometimes just surfs the Web via Google.

At school, she is enrolled in the two-year film-based Academy of Integrated Humanities an New Media (AIM) program for juniors and seniors. It integrates three subjects — English, social studies and computer applications. Each year, AIM has a certain theme that students follow in each of the three classes. Each student in the program draws from these classes to make documentaries.

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“This generation is really about expressing themselves — ‘me media’ — where they get to connect and do it themselves,” said Caitlin McBride of Fresh Films, a sponsored organization that allows high school students in certain cities to compete to make films in a week.

The road to Wachtel’s tech savviness began almost from the moment she came into the world.

She can’t really remember audio cassettes, going right into CD’s as a child. VHS tapes and players quickly became replaced by DVD’s. She grew up using computers, recalling how even as a child she used Microsoft Word to type up brief assignments. On family vacations to Lake Tahoe, her family would use CD players for those eight-hour round-trip car rides.

“We still do these trips but the only difference is that instead of CD players, we all have iPods. We are a family of 6 and 4 of us have iPods,” she said.

Anastasia Goodstein runs the YPulse blog and is due to release her first book, “Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens Are Really Doing Online” next spring, which is about demystifying the relationship between teens and technology. She said Wachtel’s experience, like other teens', has been defined by communal links forged online.