ICT in English

On Tuesday had a great lecture on ICT in English by Trevor Millum, who is a former Director of NATE (National Association for the Teaching of English).  His ideas on how to use ICT interactively were fantastic and I think I've probably got ideas for serveral lessons already out of that lecture.  I really loved the brick wall idea, where you use the highlight to block cover words making a brick wall effect, and then randomly uncover the words to try and guess the context of the text.  He used it with a food label on a tin of cadbury's hot chocolate.  As we uncovered the blocks we were guessing - is it a recipe?  Is it a poem?  Is it an instruction manual?  It was really difficult to ascertain what type of text it was for ages!  Pure genius!  I also loved his way of taking a poem and sorting it by alphabetising the content.  You were then left with an amount of random words in alphabetical order and you can make of them what you wish. You can then ask pupils to sort words, ideas from this, perhaps make up their own phrases, lines of poetry.  Quite often the ideas from the original poem would surface!  It was all really inspirational stuff, and very practical and achievable too.