Michigan Technology comes slowly to small rural school districts like Portland Public Schools in Michigan.
Money is tight and there is little funding or time for teacher training.
But it does eventually arrive, and with it come opportunities to challenge students' notions of text and broaden their literacy skills. I have found hypertext to be a wonderful vehicle for growing middle school students' literacies. If nothing else it challenges students to find relationships between pieces of text, and such relational thinking helps move them beyond their traditional concepts of textuality. But of course, there is so much more. The purpose of my eighth grade language arts class is not to teach students about technology.