This article explores language and literacy teachers' classroom experiences in a digital age. Drawing on multi-literacies and new literacy studies frameworks, we use metaphors of classroom as text and teacher as author to build an understanding of the challenges and changes examined in the findings of two separate studies. The teachers were challenged to reconsider conceptions of individual "knowers" and textual authority/authorship in their classrooms and how they engage students critically in an exploration of the word and the world beyond the edges of the page and the walls of the English language arts classroom.