Stitch assist just helps you keep certain artifacts in the consecutive pictures so that the pictures are easier to stitch together. The key thing to making panoramas is to make sure that your pictures overlap a little bit so that whatever you are using to stitch the panorama can know where to link the pictures together. You can do it easily on your XT if you keep that last fact in mind.
This was a tutorial I found helpful:
http://photo-class.deviantart.com/ar...norama-5380280