Describe an important site of multimodal communication in your life, or your students' lives. How might a multimodal analysis of meaning prove useful? How does this compare with traditional notions of literacy?

I have chosen Smore.com as a multimodal communication site.  I have used it in the past with my students, as a tool for them to research and present their findings to the class, in a multimodal way. At the link, below, I have recorded a video tutorial on youtube, explaining how to use Smore.com.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf68PlBgTBo

Essentially, it is an on-line poster site, and it allows students to embed videos, pictures, audio files ( podcasts, music, etc.. ) to their poster presentations. I believe this motivates students to create a better end product, because it allows them to investigate a personally interesting topic and share their understandings in a more personal way.

Smore.com Modality options

As you can see from the above image , students can present their research findings in several DIFFERENT MODALITIES  - text, images, video, audio recordings of their voices, musical audio , external video links, etc.... 

I have used this as a multimodal communication tool with my students  in both South Korea and Kuwait.  I have given my students the options to choose from among a list of topics, and they are also free to choose diffreent modalities to include in their presentation.  Multimodal analysis of meaning motivates the students to do a better job, because it allows them to presonally construct and explain their understanding of the topic in a variety of ways. 

Traditional notions of literacy have primarily been limited to text based resources.  By expanding the options of literacy to include other modalities, students are more engaged in learning, as both researchers, presenters and audience consumers of the information.  

I have seen first-hand the value of teaching English, using multi-modalities.For empirical research on the usage of multimodalities in ELL, check out the academic abstracts, above and below.  

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/lnc3.12076

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/tesq.326