Abstract: Beginning in the fall of 2018, preservice English teachers at the University of Georgia (USA) engaged in a new course designed to encourage and excite intentional and authentic teaching with digital tools and social media where their pupils are creators, collaborators and connectors. This presentation explores the what we learned, both in terms of preservice teachers’ practices in the course and their concurrent field placement – and in our examination of what from the course carried into or influenced their subsequent practice in their student teaching. Findings presented will unpack preservice teachers’ work and demonstrate what it meant to, in the best of cases, connect secondary student readers and writers with opportunities to use technology to share their work with authentic audiences, to write across multiple modes, to socially annotate digital texts, to collaborate with learners beyond the classroom, and to create and do work that does work in their communities, both local and virtual.