PicLits for Creativity!

I have heard about PicLits (inspired picture writing) before, but today I "stumbled" across a great post by lsanderson that provides lots suggestions for ways this site can be used to benefit students. For years, I taught several 4th grade writing classes each day, so sites that encourage writing, vocabulary, and brainstorming capture my attention.

Here are parts of Lisa post on her Tech Tuesday Blog (but you really should go look at her whole post and site):

"Looking to increase students’ vocabularies? Or make learning about parts of speech more engaging? PicLits is a web site that lives up to its slogan: ‘Inspired Picture Writing’.
You choose a photograph from the site’s gallery. Based on the picture selected, the site supplies a word bank of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs and a category called universal that incorporates pronouns as well as punctuation . Then you simply drag-n-drop the words onto the picture to make lists, phrases, sentences, etc. (The site’s creator says he was inspired by the refrigerator magnetic poetry that was popular a few years ago.) There also is the option to freestyle instead of using the word bank. You simply type in what you want. Have a little writer’s block? To the right of the freestyle section, a few ideas or keywords are provided to get you going."

"When I first visited PicLits, I immediately thought it would be great for ELL students or any student who needs vocabulary work. Furthermore, the word bank and suggestions are scaffolds that many students need. I especially like how the site uses interactive pop-ups to suggest adding capital letters or different forms of the word."

Lisa says that even more information and ideas for using PicLits can be obtained from Ann Carnevale's blog post about this site. I really like Lisa's final sentence in her post:

"Overall, PicLits looks good for instilling good, old fashioned, creativity!"

picture from http://www.flickr.com/photos/54779221@N00/3709683197/