Online scenario used as an English resource
Grove Academy’s principal teacher of computing, Kenny Stewart, has created an online scenario based on the novel Buddy by Nigel Hinton (Puffin Books, 1994). In today’s English lesson, S2 pupils studying Buddy are introduced to the scenario and begin to work through it with help from Kenny and their English teacher.
The scenario invites the pupils to become reporters travelling through Buddy’s world, finding out information about different aspects of the novel and completing exercises that allow them to move on to new locations and new parts of the adventure.
Teacher profile
Kenny has taught at Grove Academy for 20 years. Before that, he taught for five years at Harris Academy. He is currently principal teacher of computing to S1-S6 pupils and has responsibility for the ICT programme throughout the school. He is also the school’s part-time ICT coordinator, a Masterclass trainer and last year was an examiner for Advanced Higher Computing. He is halfway through a two-year research project on accelerated learning for the General Teaching Council for Scotland.
Kenny has worked closely with the European Union funded Innovative Teaching and Learning Environments for Schools ITALES) project, mainly developing and testing scenarios produced with the ITALCO authoring tool. These, including the Buddy scenario, can be accessed at http://itales.edm.luc.ac.be/italco/Scenarios/start.html.
School profile
Grove Academy is situated not far from the sea in Broughty Ferry to the east of Dundee. There are 916 pupils: 29 have free school lunches and 49 are registered as having special educational needs. 32 pupils speak English as a second language. The school has won gold awards for its Enterprise activities and has won the Courier/Royal Bank of Scotland debating competition.
There are 240 computers in the school. The ICT rooms can be booked by any teacher when they are not in use for computing or business studies. Kenny is the part-time ICT coordinator. The computing teachers at Grove Academy offer a programme of in-service ICT courses for staff.