This article documents what happened when a teacher in an urban school shifted classroom practice through changing participation structures to incorporate digital technology and multiple modalities into a fifth grade literacy curriculum. This shift in teacher practice provided opportunities for immigrant students to become more visible in the classroom. Through a description of the new participation structures, composing processes, and content of student narratives documented over 4 years, we show how multimodal storytelling provided openings for students who had been previously overlooked by their teachers or disconnected from the academic curriculum to actively participate in academic learning. We conclude that the introduction of multiple modalities and a set of assignments that focused on integrating students' home and community lives into their work shifted the center of the classroom instruction away from mandated texts to student narratives. With the introduction of the multimodal project, immigrant students whose experiences were at the periphery of the classroom discourse, found space to add their voices to the classroom community. As a result, they were able to attain a participatory presence in the classroom.