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Young students must become proficient in the new literacies of 21st‐century technologies to be considered literate. This department explores how literacy educators can integrate information and communication technologies into the curriculum.

This case study examines one African American adolescent male's digital choices and experiences during the creation of a digital story about Minecraft. This study introduces digital participatory choice cultures as a framework to consider how he might recognize and use existing meaning‐making and composition strategies to bridge what young people know, do, and learn both within and outside educational settings. Data include interviews, observations, photo elicitation, digital photos, and digital and nondigital texts. First, the author highlights the student's choices to create a topic and digital story. Second, the author examines how the student's digital choices illustrate the literacies, agency, and identities inherent in digital participatory choice culture, which helped him express himself in both cultural and digital ways. The analysis demonstrates how race mattered in the student's digital composition, which suggests that literacy educators can design instruction to learn about and build from their students’ already existing funds of knowledge.

As our world becomes increasingly interconnected, complex global challenges necessitate cross-cultural collaborative efforts. Thus, developing cosmopolitan literacies among students and teachers becomes ever more important. Believing that cosmopolitan literacies are central to being literate in contemporary times, the authors build on their existing project-based inquiry model to include global themes (e.g., poverty, global water and sanitation, climate change) and cross-cultural exchange. This theory-into-practice article explains the Project-Based Inquiry Global process and six design features that enable teachers to facilitate collaborative inquiry projects with their students. As students interact during the process, they begin to practice cosmopolitan literacies by engaging in reading, writing, and inquiry with people and topics from around the world, becoming cross-cultural difference makers.

Online synchronous collaborative writing (SCW) is ubiquitous among youths and has found its way into many secondary English language arts classrooms. Yet, to maximize the affordances of online SCW, teachers need a synthesis of contemporary, evidence-based practices for how to support students during this form of writing. The purpose of this article is to highlight best practices for teachers and schools interested in leveraging their one-to-one technologies in more collaborative ways that include online SCW. The authors situate SCW in contemporary educational initiatives and then describe ways that teachers can incorporate SCW in their writing instruction through a hybrid approach—face-to-face and online—that enhances rich, meaningful peer-to-peer learning. The authors present actionable recommendations for teachers to consider before, during, and after online SCW. The authors conclude with how this approach to writing provides students with the technical and social tools to achieve success in the information society.

Evolving digital technologies provide opportunities to engage students in activities that go beyond print‐based reading and writing and help them develop skills for reading, writing, and communicating with digital technology. Virtual reality apps are a rapidly emerging form of digital technology that provides immersive experiences in real or imagined environments. Virtual reality creates sensory experiences that involve sight, touch, hearing, and motion to allow users to feel as though they are physically present in that environment. These types of immersive experiences can be used to engage learners in multimodal literacy practices as well as scientific practices such as forming hypotheses and interpreting data to inform courses of action. The author provides a classroom example of using virtual reality in an integrated science and literacy lesson to engage students in discovering, answering, and writing about questions they developed as they explored a virtual environment.

This department focuses on literacy leaders, including school and instructional leaders, teachers, and external partners, who are working to improve outcomes for adolescent and adult learners in a wide range of education settings. Columns investigate the challenges and complexities inherent in such work and share lessons learned, impactful strategies and approaches, and promising pathways forward.

The authors showcase the use of DocuViz, an information visualization tool, as a means to support middle school students’ online synchronous collaborative writing. The purpose of this study was to explore writing outcomes when students write in groups and independently. Providing students with a tool to help them understand their individual contributions to a collaboratively written Google Doc may be one reason why group‐written essays were significantly longer and received significantly higher rubric scores when compared with the independently written essays. Results also indicated that group writing had a positive impact on later independent essay writing. Student survey results reflect positive reactions to online collaborative writing. The authors conclude with a discussion of the theoretical contributions that this study makes to New Literacies Studies and provide guidelines for teachers interested in supporting students’ writing development through technology‐enhanced strategies that position students as partners in the writing process.

This department column is a venue for thoughtful discussions of contemporary issues dealing with policy and practice, remixed in ways that generate new insights into enduring dilemmas, debates, and controversies.

This teaching tip showcases instructional strategies and scaffolds from an out‐of‐school digital writing camp. Often, teachers may be hesitant to incorporate digital tools into their literacy instruction for various reasons (e.g., scripted curriculum, fear and uncertainty of digital tools, lack of experience and knowledge with technology), yet it is quite similar to using the writers’ workshop approach with the added necessity of explicit scaffolding. Three main scaffolds of reading aloud mentor texts, teacher modeling of the digital tools, and providing time to play with the digital tools are further explained. The author highlights lower to higher tech digital tools, such as Google Slides, PicLits, Animoto, and iMovie, and reveals how they can be incorporated into the literacy classroom in engaging and meaningful ways.

In an eighth‐grade English language arts class, 100 students used virtual reality headsets, augmented reality–capable smartphones, tablets, desktop computers, online scavenger hunts, and print‐based texts as an introduction to William Shakespeare's life and works. The authors highlight the need for educators to offer multimodal instruction that responds to literary appetites of adolescent readers. A preservice teaching candidate and two teacher educators experimented with multimodal instruction to support introductory activities that helped adolescent readers develop meaningful relationships with challenging texts. Findings showcase literacy engagement characterized by immersion, collaboration, and modernization of content. Recommendations are made for future research in the area of multimodal literacy learning.