The multimodal effects in the design of digital technologies on students' meaning-making need to be further explored in research and practice. This chapter aims to unpack the connections between technological design and students' cognitive processes to understand how meaning-making via technology use is multimodally realized. A layered semiotic analysis of students' use of common technologies and design features in learning activities demonstrates that the technological activation of meaning potentials interacts with students' actualizations in scaled cognitive processing that determine multimodal meaning-making. These findings illustrate how technological affordances emerge in practice, which are vital to consider in research and for pedagogical practices involved in a multimodal realization of learning activities within the contemporary digitization of education.