Hearing about texting during a lesson makes every teacher instantly annoyed. We all know about the technological world we (and our students) live in. Sometimes they write text messages while we’re explaining the new material, and sometimes we have to do that. There’s no escaping this, but it’s not all that bad when used right. As educators we need to adjust to the new situations that pop up every day, including dealing with texting. A text message can actually be helpful in the hard task of connecting our students’ real world and our classrooms (or computer lab, in my case). One of my favorite and free resources to do this is  called ifaketext.

The web tool allows you to create fake iPhone text message conversations. As you can see from the screenshot above, you can adjust the carrier and the timestamp, as well as who the conversation is with (Contact Name). You can have up to 20 “lines” of text on one picture (or a couple, depends on the amount of text and lines you want, I do prefer to keep them to the minimum of 4), and you can adjust if a line is received or appearing like it is sent from the phone’s owner (that can happen in either blue or green color). Here’s an example I created:

When you are done with the preparation, typing your text and generating the picture, it’s time to download and save your work locally. The below screenshot shows what the interface looks like. Click the “Download the image” button that I highlighted in yellow and you are done! You’re getting the file manager pop-up and you just have to choose a folder to store your image. The output image has no watermarks or anything, it’s clean, pretty and ready to be used in your classroom!

List of Technology teacher ideas of how to use this tool:

1. Review vocabulary – as in the example I used above in the screenshots, you can use this tool to revise new words (in the case of the screenshots, the new word is cookies)
2. Introduce homework / test info / task – instead of trying to explain what next week’s test is going to include, just present it with a fake text message projected on the white board/wall. I guarantee you it’s going to grab the attention of the students
3. Book review – after reading/going through a techie book, you can use this tool to generate a conversation between two characters. Example: If the book you’re reading with your younger students currently is “Clicker the cat” by Kyla Cullinane, you can create a fake text message conversation between Clicker and his friend Digi the dog. This is what I made for my students:

I hope this post was helpful to you. If you’ve got suggestions of things to add to it, I’d love it if you contacted me or just left a comment down below about the ways you use this tool in your own lessons.

Happy teaching!