This study examined 94 bilingual and emergent bilingual 10th grade students’ perspectives on multimodal composing for academic purposes in their English Language Arts class. A social semiotics theoretical framework was employed to understand students’ views of the affordances and constraints when composing three digital multimodal projects—a hypertext poetry analysis, a persuasive podcast, and a video literary analysis. Qualitative analysis of interviews and written reflections revealed how students overwhelmingly held a positive view of composing with multiple modes for academic purposes. Students detailed the unique semiotic resources of nonlinguistic modes for supporting their understanding of the content and innovative meaning‐making. A majority of students described how communicating through multiple modes offered impactful opportunities to express their bilingual/bicultural identities as well as explore the affective dimensions of the English Language Arts content. Additionally, students explained how the process of multimodal composing fostered peer collaboration and creating meaningful connections to other works and their lives. Along with affordances, students also described a variety of challenges when designing their digital projects, including technical difficulties, uncertainty of expectations, and sufficiently representing their ideas multimodally. This study concludes with implications for how educators can learn from listening to emergent bilingual students’ perspectives when integrating technology in the classroom.

Nowadays digitalization is one of the key drivers of insurance market development in Russia. Introducing InsurTech provides insurance companies with a number of competitive advantages, such as increasing speed of making decisions, opportunities for portfolio expansion, tools for risk assessment and fraud detection. Application of digital technologies helps them to increase effectiveness of business processes. Among all business processes of an insurance company we emphasize the most significant in terms of insurance service provision. Those include the processes of underwriting, conclusion and support of an insurance contract, settlement of an insured event. However, adoption of innovations blurs borders between business processes. The paper discusses InsurTech tools implemented in these business processes, evaluates the effectiveness of their use, identifies the associated risks. The conclusion is made that the risk of unauthorized access or use of personal data is the most significant. Another significant risk is the model risk arising from the imperfection of the models used, insufficient data or its poor quality. In addition to that, the impact of digitalization on the activities of insurance companies and its business processes should not be overestimated. Funding: The reported study was funded by RFBR, project number 20-01-00785.

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