Piclits for Creative Writing

Piclits is a great easy to use tool to encourage students to write creatively.  It revovles around attention grabbing images and word banks for writing a caption, a short paragraph or a short poem/story. Word lists are categorized by nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs and a universal list.

Piclits offers a fun way to learn new vocabulary and play with word forms and sentence structure.


See the full PicLit at PicLits.com


There are two options for writing: one is by dragging and dropping words unto the picture and the second is by clicking on the freestyle button. You can save and edit a Piclit if you sign up. If you don't sign up you can still save your Piclit by using the Snipping tool in windows (here is a short video explaining how to do it).


Application in the classroom:

• Students find a picture that relates to current events and write about it
• Students write a short poem 
• Students write events that happened before a story that they read
• Students write about a different ending to a story that they read
• Students create a slogan/banner for a campaign
• Students find a picture that relates to the way they feel and write about it

If you have any more ideas, write to me!

International Project on Epals

I have started an international email project using ePals and my 10th graders communicated both with students from Poland and the United States. I'll share a few points about it.

In order to be able to collaborate with other classes across the world, teachers need to use a site that will provide them a platform with which they can monitor their students' communication with a classroom that has the same interests as their own. In general, the most important thing is to find a teacher who shares similar interests, has the same age group students, and is available to work with you at the same time. One of the biggest sites for online collaboration is www.epals.com.

The projects can be done through email, Skype, a live chat, recording asynchronously (not at the same time) and by using different tools that are on the Net. In general, teachers need to pay attention to the difference in time zones if they intend to have live communication via Skype for example.

Class sizes should be more or less equal so that students can be matched to work in pairs with a student in the other country with whom they can exchange emails.

What can students write about? They can write about different cultures and holidays, describe their city/country/family, special foods, hobbies, the view from their living room window, a movie or book they have read, etc.

This is a tutorial that I prepared:

To learn more about how to use Epals click here.