I have experimented with iFake Text Message recently. In three words: No está mal. [It’s not bad.] It is an easy way to refresh the standard written dialogue that we all assign across levels. Maybe it’s a first-day-of school conversation. Maybe it’s a chat with a friend. Maybe it’s an transaction at a market. Maybe it’s a traveler trying to negotiate her way in a new city. Dialogues work because they are concrete in both form and vocabulary. In no circumstance are speakers in these situations going to spout out specific scientific vocabulary. They won’t dig in or shut down rhetorically. This is communication in its cleanest form.

These dialogues frequently take the form of handwritten compositions. Word or Google Docs work too if these written works become part of an online portfolio or are to be workshopped and/or built upon later. Even at these levels, there are ways to make the process more fun.

  • Limit chains so that students can only see the prior line without seeing the whole conversation. Honestly, this could be pretty fun to create a year-long dialogue in one class or between classes. You could adapt this system for erasure/blackout poetry to mask the prior responses.
  • Create telephone-type chains where all students are responding to all prompts. Passing notes meets “pass the mic.”
  • Adapt some rules from games like Word Sneak or Taboo where students have to use or avoid specific words.
  • Use dialogues to review vocabulary and expressions that students already know.
  • Use dialogues to preview vocabulary and expressions that students will study. Can they use word roots and other clues to infer meaning? Can they use circumlocution to make themselves understood?
  • Go old AP Language style and have students respond to prompts on the fly with prefab questions that may or may not (co)rrespond to the responses students provide.

In some ways, iFake Message just becomes a more modern interface to publish the final product of the processes described above–whether it’s a solo effort or a class-sourced one. By transcribing the dialogue into the app, students can create something to share or display in a more attractive way. Beyond that, however, I think there are codes governing space (character or screen limitations) and register (tone and type or vocabulary) that teachers can leverage.

Consider the following example:

The exchange is set up as a conversation between friends at the start of the school year, thinking specifically about starting Spanish class again. The “set up” is an exploration of two of the most troubling false cognates in the language: exitado/a means “turned on,” not “excited” and embarazado/a means “pregnant,” not “embarrassed.” Perhaps this is a more layered example than I’d use to set up the activity, but I imagine that even Spanish 1 students could get there soon.

Students could use this set-up to:

  • introduce themselves.
  • work through specific vocabulary.
  • work through specific constrictions. The familiarity of the message platform lends itself to colloquial expressions and imperative verbs.
  • create digital signage for classroom rules and expectations.
  • create imagined dialogues between literary characters.
  • explore text message slang in Spanish or other languages
  • explore the difference between formal and informal communication.
  • introduce issues related to accents, pronoun case and syntax that might otherwise be less relevant for students. When does precision matter? Where is close enough close enough? Who decides?
  • practice self-correction, a lesson students need to learn and one my clumsy thumbs give me tons of opportunities for practice. See image below.
  • move into other subject areas, creating virtual dialogues between historical or literary characters.

Now, obviously if students are going to use a tool labeled “Fake,” there are parameters and potential pitfalls. These should be named initially and revisited consistently. First, it’s a free site with Google ads–as many are–but even in the realm of free sites the ads are off putting in a PG-13 sort of way. Second, the sites own “About” section, it says “iFakeTextMessage.com will allow you to use with your creativity and create fun and exciting ways to prank your friends and generate any text message image that you can imagine.” The emphasis is mine. Pranking is problematic, as is the use of lewd or profane language. Students would have to practice restraint and proves themselves responsible.

While these issues are red flags for sure, the optimist in me see this as a ready made lesson on digital citizenship and social media awareness. It’s just this easy to how easy it is to create fake threads. When used in the context of the classroom and with everyone on equal footing, this tool can be empowering. Conversely, if trust is lost or if social pressures prevail, this tool could cause harm. There is no doubt about it. This is not exclusive to text messages: it also concerns images, or other social media sites that could be mocked up or manipulated. This becomes the very clear dividing line for me: is it a mockup to explore the subject at hand and/or the limitations of social media or does it bend towards the limitations? I used to use TodaysMeet–now defunct unfortunately–as a sort of Twitter clone. Established as a back channel chat, it allows students to comment and quote as they might on Twitter. As is the case here, it’s a closed, clone system. Still, some of the bad habits from the open system do make their way into the closed system. I do believe that working with tools like iFake Text Message can help students learn language lessons while playing in a sandbox of social media skills.