There are so many exciting ways to improve the writing skills of our students using technology. The following are just a few ideas:
1. Digital narrative or newsreport using Premier - see Photobus for great ideas:
2. Digital timeline with hyperlinks through to podcasts, journal entries, etc
3. Insert word to transform a poem or a short story
4. Found Poems: trawl the net and snatch a line or two from a range of poems, plays,etc to create an original poem
5. Soundscape to reflect the mood and theme of a play such as Romeo and Juliet using Soundbooth
6. Littrip using Google Earth-
7. A wiki book club
8. A playscript, film script and/or storyboard in [url=http://celtx.com/ ]Celtx.com[/url]
9. Flash Tale: a very short story: [url=http://www.dreamingmethods.com/archive.html ]Flas Tales[/url]
10. A persuasive speech as a podcast using Soundbooth
11. Twitter text: a novel in three lines: Twitter text[url=http://www.photobus.co.uk/index.php?id=2 ]Photobus[/url][url=http://www.googlelittrips.org/ ]Littrips[/url]

I'd like to add another couple:

* create a cartoon using ToonDoo

* get students to contribute to wikis (Wikipedia or custom created wikis). This gives students a huge sense of ownership and self-worth. Much more so than simply writing and submitting a text that gets marked and then drifts into obscurity

Great ideas guys ! Love ToonDoo !
Personally I have been blogging and making stop motion videos with my English classes for some time (over 4 years so the DER is a little old hat to some of us by now).
Check out the ideas here http://carlodramaqueen.edublogs.org/
I would post a topic and the kids would chack my blog for what they had to write then complete it on their own blog.

Also there are more English ideas on my wiki http://carlodramaqueen.wikispaces.com/English+%26+Technology

Really wishing Celtx, and Hotpotatoes were on the laptops