US youths' lives are increasingly divided between the academic requirements of school and immersion in new media and culture outside school. Educators can help bridge in-school and out-of-school literacy practices by encouraging students to engage with hybrid texts that draw on multiple modes of representation. In this paper, we analyze the "disconnect" between academic literacy and new media, discuss the concept of hybridity as a way to bridge it, and provide a linguistically grounded analysis of students' hybrids texts and practices in two technology-intensive learning environments: a digital storytelling project in an after-school university-community collaborative and a one-to-one laptop program in an urban school district.