In February 2008, Parliament announced its intention to undertake an Inquiry into the National Curriculum and invited submissions of written evidence.

Naace has completely revised its quality assurance scheme for service providers to make it consistent with established principles of self-review. Details of this new '2.0' scheme may be found here.

The Naace Annual Strategic Conference and Exhibition opened in Torquay in early March 2008. This is the definitive ICT Conference in the UK for all those involved in advancing education through the use of modern technologies in learning and teaching.

Naace has introduced a 'hot-seat' where invited colleagues field questions over a four week period. Our guest in the 'hot-seat' will either answer online at specific times, or at pre-arranged regular intervals. We look forward to hearing from you!

This short article aims to highlight the background, key features and current vision of the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) project at Ranvilles Infant School. The full version of this research project is available through the University of Winchester library: Aubrey-Smith, F.S., (2007) 'How the implementation of a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) can affect the strategic development of a whole school. MA(Ed) Dissertation. University of Winchester.'

Naace were commissioned by Becta to undertake research during February and March 2007 into the key characteristics and the development of e-maturity in the school workforce. This report describes the outcomes of this work.

Focus: ICT Co-ordinator

We have two articles for ICT Coordinators this week.

In the first, Alison Ball tells us about the websites that she finds most useful. The second piece is from regular contributor, Philip Griffin and narrates the next step in his school's progress towards the ICT Mark.

If you feel that you could make a contribution to Sharing Success please contact me at h.govier@btopenworld.com.

Focus: ICT Coordinator

In this jam-packed issue, the lead article looks at the use of Windows Movie maker to develop ICT and geography skills and on page 3 Jackie Lester offers advice on preparing for an Ofsted inspection. On page 4 Rhona Dick introduces two pieces of software for exploring moral dilemmas and finally we have a Top Tip for maths teaching.
For comment or contributions please contact me at h.govier@btopenworld.com

Philip continues his account of how his school made progress towards an ICT Mark.

Students who perform very well in some subjects can often, inexplicably it seems, do poorly in others. This is a common problem in almost every school in the UK. In fact, when compared to virtually every other developed nation, the UK performs very badly in terms of varying standards within schools. Tackling these differences has become a focus for many schools.