Chapter 6: Integrating Multimodal Composition Technology in Interdisciplinary Learning

It is not surprising nowadays to see a 2-year old operate on a smartphone with ease. Children live in a technology-rich world and their language acquisition, knowledge development, and communication processes are infused with multimodal representations (e.g., texts, visuals, sounds, and movement). Technology and tools that incorporate multimodal representations can be used to help students’ content learning, especially those that involve multiple disciplines (Jiang, Shen, & Smith, 2019; Jiang, Smith, & Shen, 2019). These tools can also support emerging bilingual students’ language learning and academic writing (Hepple et al., 2014; Vandommele et al., 2017).

However, although it is common that students process multimodal information in classrooms, multimodal technology has not been applied in the context of school learning in a systematic way. In many classrooms, instructions are not explicitly provided on how one can learn and apply the affordances of different modalities and tools, and much less instruction is given on how one can compose and create artifacts using multimodal technologies (Smith & Shen, 2017).