Piclits

Piclits

What is Piclits.com?

                http://www.piclits.com is an educational e-learning website that uses words and photographs to inspire users to write, express themselves, and share their work with others. The website provides a forum for creative writing, social interaction, and is an engaging teaching tool for all levels. It is FREE fun and safe.
                A “Piclits” is a combination of words placed on an image to capture the essence, story, and meaning of the picture. It can be a caption, a sentence, a story, a paragraph, a poem, a rap, a quotation, lyrics from a song, and more. You can create a Piclits using Drag-n-Drop keywords or Freestyle.

How to use Piclits.

                The first step is you have to sign up by clicking at “sign up” at the upper right corner of this website, (Piclits.com). And you have to do following steps:

   1.You will see that at the middle of the page, there are many pictures for you to choose.

   2. You can write words or sentences by you can do 2 ways.

2.1 Drag the words at the bottom and place at the picture (when you already placed, you can click at the triangle symbol at the end of the word to change forms of vocabulary.)

2.2 Click at “Freestyle”, type words for making sentences in the blank below the picture then click “create”. When you got the sentence on the picture already, you can do following steps:

-  Click at picture for saving pictures and sentences. When you access to this website again and sign in, you will find the saved file in “My Piclits”.

-  You can send pictures and sentences to social network by clicking at Blog or Share.

Watch more about how to use Piclits from this Video.

                 I recommend this program, ( http://www.piclits.com) for teaching and I believe students will like it. They will get to practice writing, imagination and storytelling in English and they can share good feeling to their friends also.

The program that I like the most in this subject, (Techniques and innovation in English Language Teaching)

               My favorite website for creating Language Arts materials is PicLits (Picture  + Literature = PicLit). I always try to emphasize the visual aspects of writing , and this website is a wonderful merging of photography and writing! PicLits is a collection of pictures, where writers can drag and drop words onto the images to create picture-inspired writing (PicLit's slogan)! Here's a screenshot of their homepage:

For the activity in classroom (have a computer and the internet)

Piclits offers a wide variety of breathtaking photos, with a huge range of subject matter. The color photos are vivid and the black-and-white photos are dramatic. It is guaranteed to be something to interest every student, and photos are updated regularly.

 This makes Piclits a great activity for differentiation! If you have a computer and you have the internet, you can let students pick their own images to work.
Watch more about the activity in classroom. (have a computer and the internet)

For the activity in classroom ( don’t have a computer and the internet.)

            First, I will printed  different photos (with their lists of adjectives and adverbs), and turned them into "PicLit cards" Here's a sample of what my PicLit cards look like:

                 Next, I will divide student into 5 groups. (5 students for 1 group)

             After that, I will give Piclit cards to each group. Then each group has to describe about the pictures that they got by using adjectives and adverbs that I choose for them. There is 30 minutes for describing the pictures.

           Finally, each group comes present what they describe in front of the class.

                  So, students will enjoy picking their image, the word lists,and they can write by using their imagination.