Students in multimodal learning clubs use a variety of texts to learn important content.According to the PEW Internet and American Life project, adolescents' Internet use grew from 75% of adolescents in 2000 to 93% in 2010 (Lenhart, Purcell, Smith, & Zickuhr, 2010). As a result, the lines between the physical and the virtual worlds are blurring for many adolescents (Black & Steinkuehler, 2009). In the middle grades, educators in all disciplines need to understand how students are using text in these digital spaces so that they can best support their students' learning (O'Brien, Stewart, & Beach, 2009). Multimodal learning clubs is a classroom strategy that supports students' acquisition of new knowledge by pairing digital tools with requisite literacy strategies.Locating the adolescent in a digital worldThe nature of reading and writing continues to change in response to the mosaic of texts adolescents encounter and construct on a daily basis. Ninety-three percent of youth ages 12 to 17 report going online occasionally and 63% report doing so daily (Lenhart et al., 2010), and what they find online are mixed media, or multimodal content, that they use to construct meaning about a topic and to convey their understanding to others. Research suggests that approximately one in five teens accesses multimodal content (e.g., pictures, written text, video, music) and then synthesizes and remixes this content to create hybrid texts that integrate these forms for representation (Lenhart et al., 2010).The ease with which adolescents access technology, however, is too often confused with their capacity to use these tools critically for academic purposes (Casey, 2011; Pahl & Rowsell, 2006; Zawalinski, 2009). Middle grades educators play an important role in mentoring students to use these tools appropriately to access and share information (Duffy, 2009; Hartman, Morsink, & Zheng, 2010; Zhang & Duke, 2008). Gee and Levine (2009) argued, It is far more likely that students will learn complex language and sophisticated problem-solving skills when the fate of a digital world depends on it (p. 48). As adolescents weave through these digital worlds, they interact with one another through fixed and moving text, and they use these interactions to make their own contributions to this digital landscape. In the classroom, students can learn how to use these digital communication tools in ways that support academic learning.Theories of student engagement in the middle grades suggest that teachers should offer opportunities for students to engage in academic decision making, build relationships with students that connect their social identities with their academic development, and draw on relevant assessment results to differentiate learning activities for the range of learners in the classroom (Anderman & Anderman, 2010; Connell & Wellborn, 1991; Guthrie, 2004; Wigfield & Eccles, 2002). This theoretical framework is useful for understanding the appeal of digital platforms for many adolescent learners today. Digital platforms (a) provide opportunities for choice, as there are multiple pathways, tools, and media from which they can select; (b) offer empowering feelings of success, as feedback is often immediate; and (c) give the perception of belonging to a larger, often virtual, community (Gee & Levine, 2009). The intersection of what we understand about middle level engagement with these 21st century tools offers potentially powerful possibilities for classroom instruction and increased adolescent motivation, engagement, and, subsequently, achievement.Understanding multimodality in the classroomMultimodality, by definition, refers to the use of both traditional print material and dynamic digital content, including fixed and moving images, to construct and comprehend information (Jewitt & Kress, 2003). As Gee (2003) suggested,Language is not the only important communicational system. …