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The Internet has caused educators to confront issues related to new technologies, as previous technological innovations have never been adopted so rapidly and in so many places simultaneously.

Students use instant messaging (IM) to pair-share during the reading of the story with their 8 o'clock buddy.

As more classrooms and schools adopt one-to-one laptop instruction, the need to document the work of teachers and students in such settings is important (Dunleavy et al., 2007). The descriptions found in this article provide the pragmatic details of making such a transition in instruction and can serve as roadmaps for teachers considering such a shift in their instructional practice.

Once these activities are complete, he checks to see what the morning sponge is (an activity to keep students engaged as Todd checks in with individual students). Today the sponge is centered on vocabulary, so Michael uses the thesaurus on his laptop for the word launched so that he can gain an idea of what this word means and learn about related words. He then uses his word processing application to write a sentence using this word, thereby demonstrating his understanding of its definition. Complementing the sentence is a nonlinguistic representation of the word that he creates by using a drawing application (see Figure 3). This activity and the class webpage demonstrate the hybridity evident in new literacies documents (Lemke, 1998), where students use word processing, drawing, or music in a single document.

When working independently, Michael does one of three things. The first is to respond to a writing prompt on his computer that is directly related to the story or informational text read that day. Michael also completes a digital practice sheet or worksheet, a more traditional use of technology. The third activity is a book study. Students are offered multiple titles that are related to the theme of the core program from which to choose.

Breaks in Instruction During recess breaks throughout the day, students are free to stay in the room and engage in noninstructional activities. Michael engages in sending IMs, checking and sending e-mail, and going online to enter kid-friendly virtual worlds like Club Penguin (www.miniclip.com/games/club-penguin/en/). Students, particularly those who do not have Internet access at home, enjoy engaging in these activities during breaks in instruction.

End of the Day Routines Before leaving school, Michael picks up his homework from the server. Tonight's homework is a graphic organizer that is to be filled out from a webpage. Todd saved a copy of the webpage for pickup because not all of Michael's classmates have Internet access at home. Michael leaves school with his laptop tucked into his backpack, ready for out-of-school learning.

Punctuation errors are huge, and apostrophe errors. Students seem to have absolutely no idea what an apostrophe is for.

Poor grammar is the major reason students fail

one in 10 new students are not qualified to take the mandatory writing courses required for graduation.

Emoticons, truncated and butchered words such as 'cuz,' are just some of the writing horrors being handed in

"Little happy faces ... or a sad face ... little abbreviations," show up even in letters of academic appeal

"spelling is getting better because of Spellcheck,"

committee will immediately get their backs up when they see that kind of written style."

"Punctuation errors are huge, and apostrophe errors. Students seem to have absolutely no idea what an apostrophe is for. None. Absolutely none."

Cellphone texting and social networking on Internet sites are degrading writing skills

The Internet norm of ignoring punctuation and capitalization as well as using emoticons may be acceptable in an e-mail to friends and family, but it can have a deadly effect on one's career if used at work.

"It would say to me ... 'well, this person doesn't think very clearly, and they're not very good at analyzing complex subjects, and they're not very good at expressing themselves, or at worse, they can't spell, they can't punctuate,'

short-change themselves,

words 'a lot' have become one word, for everyone, as far as I can tell. 'Definitely' is always spelled with an 'a' - 'definately'.

"There's a notion of a golden age in the past that students were wonderful, unlike now. I'm not sure that golden age ever existed," he says.

You can go back and read Plato and see Socrates talking about the allegations that this generation isn't as not as good as previous ones," he notes.

ven though students believed they could follow a lecture and text at the same time, respondents who did text within marketing classes received lower grades