FAQs

ABOUT PIC-LITS

piclits.com is an e-learning website that utilizes photography and word banks (keywords) to improve literacy skills via writing. It is a teaching TOOL and student learning platform that not only develops writing but helps to improve reading skills as well. With an emphasis on VISUAL learning, the user is engaged by ‘doing’. It is also an interactive and a social medium for people of all ages. PIC-LITS is a safe, secure, and proprietary site.

A PIC-LIT is a combination of words placed on a photograph that not only connects with the photograph but also adds meaning to the image itself by writing with either DRAG-N-DROP or FREESTYLE. Using captions, sentences, letters, stories, poetic devices, quotations, dialogue, paragraphs, Haikus, etc …….. are all key to ones literacy and our future.

  1. We are a small team of educators who are passionate about making teachers’ lives easier while providing a tool to help them do their jobs better.
  2. We believe that literacy begins with writing and reading and applies to people of all ages across the world. It is the foundation/cement.
  3. At PIC-LITS.com we envision a world of opportunity that is enhanced and obtainable via basic literacy skills.
  4. We are focused on WRITING, “writing to read” as we say, via the use of photography and words to stimulate learning. Without developing these
    basic literacy skills, the likelihood of overcoming life’s obstacles is diminished.
  5. We are an interactive “edutainment” site that engages users of all ages to help make writing and reading readily attainable skills.

USING PIC-LITS

You can use PIC-LITS to create all sorts of writing samples…here are just a few:

Simple sentences Poems Poetic Devices
Complex sentences Ballads Palindromes
Compound sentences Letters Personification
Dialogues Postcards Metaphor/simile
Captions Song lyrics Alliteration
Questions/answers Raps Free verse
Quotations Haikus Rhymes
(people/books/movies/plays/etc) Couplets Hyperbole
Paragraphs Limericks
Journal entries Word association
Classroom assignments Foreign languages
Narratives/short stories
Informational writing

Yes! The site is safe and secure and proprietary. The images have all been chosen by our photo editor to be appropriate for all ages and demographics. We do not share our users’ email addresses with third parties.

Yes! The site works on all of your mobile devices and also can be used in the classroom with SMART Boards (whiteboards), on overhead projectors, and in computer labs. If you are having trouble, please Contact Us.

Once you’ve written a PIC-LIT, you can share it with your friends via email, Facebook, or on your blog. Just click on one of the options on the screen after saving your work and follow the easy steps.

COMMUNITY AND PRIVACY

Our site is free for your use. Please Contact Us if you have any suggestions that might make this site better!

Yes! And we’d love for you to follow us. Our Facebook page features sample PIC-LITS and noteworthy creations by some of our users, teacher feedback about the site, and articles about education and technology. Also check out and tag our Instagram page @createapiclit too!

Please fill out the Contact Us form on the site if you have any questions or problems or suggestions or feedback…or even if you just want to say hello! We promise to do our best to get back to you right away.

We do our very best to make sure that PIC-LITS.com delivers only the finest and most appropriate content for our users. If you notice anything out of line before we do, please feel free to let us know by using our Contact Us form and we will fix it right away.

Your PIC-LITS ( if you register ) are private and listed under the MY PIC-LITS tab. You can e-mail, edit, download, delete, from your MY PIC-LITS file if you chose.

USER ACCOUNTS AND PASSWORDS

It’s simple!

  1. Click on REGISTER at the top of the screen.
  2. Sign in with Google by clicking the blue button to use an existing Google account or create a new one.

OR

  1. Fill out the required fields to create a PIC-LITS user name and password, check the “I’m not a robot” box, and click the orange REGISTER button.

That’s it!

If you are using PIC-LITS as an educator, you can create Student Accounts Using GMail Dummy Accounts.

PIC-LITS requires a valid email address to create an account. In order to maximize the safety of the online experience of students, you can create dummy Google Gmail accounts for your students. The students will register for PIC-LIT accounts with their dummy account, but all of the email will go to one main Gmail account that you can monitor. This will allow you to have greater supervision of the students’ online activities.

  1. You will need a gmail account for this purpose. It will be the account that governs all dummy accounts. Name it something like teachername@gmail.com.
    (To sign up for Gmail, go to http://gmail.google.com, click the “Create an Account” button and fill out the registration form.)
  2. Assign dummy accounts to your students. (You do not have to set these up, they work automatically.)
    The student accounts will be like the account you set up in step one, except that they will have “+username” before the @ sign. So, for your classes, the dummy accounts would look something like this:
    teachername +joes@gmail.com for Joe Smith
    teachername +alicej@gmail.com for Alice Johnson
  3. Have each student register for a PIC-LIT account using their dummy email and their own individual password. A validation email will be sent to the main account – teachername@gmail.com for each student who registers. Once you validate an account a student will be able to login using their dummy email and the password they choose when they registered.

Visit Account Settings page to activate Sign in with Google option for login. You may also register a new account  with Google. Please be signed into your Google account.

If you would like to delete your user account from the site, please use the Contact Us form to send us an email and we can help deactivate your account and remove all your work and information from the system.

If you are having trouble remembering your password for the site and the Forgot Password link is not working, please Contact Us and we can help you regain access to your account via email.