In this talk, I will present two case studies that focus on international students’ transition to a new academic context (the first six months after their arrival at a French university) and how they use digital tools for different purposes during their life abroad. Not only do digital tools accompany international students’ social, cultural and linguistic transitions as they go abroad to further their language skills, but their usage also reveals part of the social and semiotic adjustments they have to make in the process. In one case study (Guichon, in print), international students were given a smartphone application to track learning opportunities by taking pictures and writing textual commentaries. The data presented include the entries participants shared with the researchers from their mobile multimodal diaries, as well as an end-of-project debriefing conducted to shed further light on the students’ digital habits and their attitudes towards self-tracking. The second case study draws on data from a 12-week course, aiming to improve their oral and interactional skills, during which Chinese students were asked to indicate meaningful locations on a paper map and produce short audio-visual clips in order to semiotically appropriate selected locations. The aim of this study was to delineate the geographies of learning (Leander, Phillips & Headrick, 2010) and examine how international students make sense of their new environment.