This article problematises the uptake and use of digital technologies by migrant and refugee-background young people, through the lens of a site-based arts pedagogy program, Culture Shack (CS), in Melbourne, Australia. It argues that online pedagogies including animation, Facebook, photoshop, mobile phones and Youtube can be used effectively for bridging cultural, gender and educational gaps, if the ways in which they are applied engage with communication preferences and discourses of culture, ethnicity and digital media technology--including issues related to technological determinism. Drawing on Dimitriadis' attention to the power of public pedagogies and cyberculture theorists such as Leung and Nakamura, this article frames creative ICT use as not merely a tool but a contested, negotiated space in which young participants shape educational transits of being and becoming, and arts-based digital learning as twenty-first century global pedagogies.