Paul Fleischman has been making some very interesting use of digital media to extend and expand the ideas in his book Eyes Wide Open. Most recently, he created this Youtube video using the current drought in California as a larger lesson in how we relate to the environment: Youtube. As you'll see, he can use the most current headlines, fights, debates, issues while also, well, opening our eyes to large issues.

I see real potential in this -- in a book, using a headline involves permissions (thus time, perhaps cost, the chance of being refused on political or some such grounds) -- but in a video you take information ripped, as it were, from the headlines and turn it directly into ideas, questions, lessons that can be used, even as that news is current. 

A book spells out and explores ideas. But then, as life relates to those ideas, an author can create little video lessons linked to the book. I like this idea a lot.