© 2005 zizzie fizz, Flickr | CC-BY-ND | via Wylio
The fake “stuff” I’m referring to in the headline includes newspaper articles, sports “trading cards,” iPhone conversations, Facebook pages etc. These can be used for conversation practice, to create reports on historical figures (or on natural disasters or on just about anything) and for numerous other learning activities.
Here are my choices for The Best Tools For Creating Fake “Stuff” For Learning:
Boy, this could be a great tool to help English Language Learner students practice writing and reading dialogue — FakeiPhoneText lets you create a text conversation that looks like the real thing and give you a unique url address of your creation. Plus, no registration is required. Obviously, this kind of conversation can also be created just as easily on paper. And, even with this app, a draft could be written on paper, and then could be typed on Word so students can use a spell and grammar check. But I’m sure they would love to be able to do a final version on something like this, which could then be posted on a student/teacher blog or website.
I Fake Text Message is a simple tool to create…fake text messages.
ClassTools has created a similar site for text messages, though theirs can be embedded.
There are several other sites that let you create multiple fake items, including trading cards, magazine cards, and newspaper articles. My favorite is Big Huge Labs, but Fodey is also good.
Fakebook is the newest tool over at the excellent ClassTools site (Russel Tarr is the creative genius behind the site). Teachers and students can use it to:
– chart the career of a historical character
– create a timeline of important events
– outline the main plot of a book, play or film
and so on!
I Fake Siri lets you create a fake conversation — in text — with the new iPhone voice feature Siri. You can then link to, or embed, your creation. It’s just another fun opportunity for ELL’s to practice writing, reading, and speaking.
Simitator is another one I’m adding to this list. It lets you create “fake” Facebook pages, Twitter threads and more. Unfortunately, though, you have to download your creation — it won’t let you link to it (most of the other tools here let you save them as Web pages.
Use the Fake Tweet Generator to create…fake tweets.
Text Chat Animator lets you create a video of an ongoing text chat that you, or students, can use in a video.
Additional suggestions are welcome.
If you found this post useful, you might want to consider subscribing to this blog for free.
You might also want to explore the over 600 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.
Hi Larry,
Great list. Thank you for the plug.
Richard
Hi Larry, Interesting site and just found it today as I was searching for help in what I want to do in my classroom.
I have disk space on our schools server that is locked down so students can only go to this directory and can be accessed only from within the schools network. I’ m looking for a way to have the students create their own blogs and practice in our classroom.
Any ideas on how to do this? I don’t have rights to be loading blogger or WordPress software and really don’t want to do this 🙂
Thanks for this site, I will subscribe and explore it, Mark
Mark,
Most school content filters let Edublogs through — that won’t work?
Larry
Loved the resources! http://twhistory.org/teachers appears to be no longer operational, though 🙁 Managed to see past projects at http://blog.twhistory.org/reenactments/
Mariel,
Thanks for the update! I’ve removed them from the list.
Larry
Twhistory seems to work, no? http://www.twhistory.org/teachers
Brian,
Yup, you’re right. It’s back online, and I’ve put it back on the list.
Thanks.
larry