Kenny: The Buddy scenario is based on the book Buddy by Nigel Hinton. This is a novel that the kids in our school study in second year. Types of things that they're doing is, they're looking at the characterisation, and they're looking at improving their sentence construction, practising using adjectives, adverbs, that kind of thing. So it fitted in well with what they were doing in second year in our school.
The Buddy scenario would probably come into a heading called scenario based learning. Now this is very much a new area, not one that has been fully exploited yet, and this was really our first attempt at trying to see how this kind of methodology could be used in a secondary school. Basically it is a kind of an adventure where the pupil or the learner will play the part of a reporter and they will go through this scenario which is made up of different locations that come from the book the novel Buddy and what they do is, in each of those locations, they will gather information, they will carry out exercises and this will help them build up a picture of what Buddy's life was like, the different places that he frequents and the people that he comes into contact with.
The first thing I had to do was familiarise myself with the use of the authoring tool, the Atalco authoring tool. There was an exemplar that came with this so I had a look at the exemplar just to see how that was structured. And then I had to have a look at the Buddy novel, find out, read the book first of all to find out a bit about it wasn't one that I was familiar with, I then looked around to see what materials were in existence at the moment, and fortunately there was a booklet that the English department use which had some exercises that looked suitable for digital adaptation.
As people become a bit more informed about it, as frameworks start to develop, it is something that I feel people will be able to use without too much training, without spending too much time. And they'll be able to use it to produce their own scenarios.