This paper reports on a study investigating the use of digital texts in schools serving low and middle/upper socioeconomic communities. It draws on theoretical notions of rhizomes from the work of Deleuze and Guattari to explain the network of relations that are formed in classrooms, and that form the context for a set of patterns observed when students and teachers engage with digital texts in literacy lessons. These patterns of complexity, fragility, continuity, conservation and authenticity can explain some of the connections and conjunctions between and across the rhizomatic systems of different classrooms as well as providing a genealogical tracing of the past back to a report on the integration of new technologies in literacy classrooms published in 1997. It would seem that in the current contemporary climate, teachers who work with digital texts at any level swim against tconventional literacy routines of the classroom.