iPHONE TEXT GENERATOR

I recently came across an excellent educational technology blog, written by a local technology coordinator, Alecia Berman-Dry.  Her recent post on iPhone text generators was so cool, I just had to share it.

I have looked for a tool like this in the past when teaching students about how easily text messages can be taken out of context and shared as a part of our digital citizenship curriculum, but there are many uses for a tool like this to create an engaging activity in your classroom.

The following suggestions are from Alecia’s blog, but I bet you could think of many more examples.Write an exchange in Spanish to practice their language skills.

1. Create an exchange between two historic characters (like General Lee and Stonewall Jackson) at an important moment in time.
2. Write a similar exchange between two characters in a book or play.
3. Explain how to complete a math problem in text. The act of "translation" means they understand in a whole new way.
4. Create an exchange about a book (like a book report) to replace book reviews.
5. Write a conversation about a political issue (social studies) that reveals two points of view.

iPhone Text Generator

 

iPhone Text Generator is a free tool that requires no account creation! Students simply enter the conversation text, and click generate. The site immediately creates a screen shot image of the exchange that can either be copied with the Snipping Tool and inserted into a document (like I did above) or downloaded as an image (PNG). This tool even works on an iPad!

If you like this week’s post I encourage you to visit Alicia’s blog, http://www.ed-tech-axis.blogspot.com/. This is definitely one that I will be adding to my reading list!