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.

For some time there has been a need to encourage and support teachers aspiring to become or recently appointed as ICT co-ordinators. Martyn Wilson and Janet Roberts of Hampshire County Council have worked with Naace and Nottingham Trent University (NTU) to develop a course aimed at new and aspiring ICT coordinators.

These articles provide information about how to apply to run the course and other details.

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!

Becoming an Institutional Member of Naace has both practical and strategic benefits. Every school concerned with using ICT effectively needs access to the developing expertise of the Naace community. Naace Members come from many diverse backgrounds including teachers, school managers, curriculum leaders, lecturers, local authority advisors, independent consultants, software developers and designers, sales personnel, technicians, student teachers, company managers, national partners and colleagues from commerce and industry.

Welcome to the Spring 2008 issue of Computer Education. In this issue we bring you a further perspective on the use of data, this time from Mike Bostock, while Helen Boulton and Pete Bradshaw explore the use of weblogs in supporting student teachers' use of reflective journals, a technique that readily transfers to younger learners. Jason Ohler offers further reflections on the philosophy of ICT in the classroom while Alex Savage provides a personal insight into BETT'08 and Jim Merret updates us on funding sources. A report on MOSEP is given by Ray Tolley while a series of articles from Christina Preston explores braided learning and social networking between professionals. Your Editor meanwhile considers 'interesting times' and how we are so close to transformational change but might never get there.

This article will explore the use of blogs and other tools to support student teachers in writing reflective journals. The main context for this is the school (or college) experience of trainee teachers on the one year secondary PGCE. Blogs are also used in the first year professional studies module in the School of Education's BA Joint Honours programme. The approach and lessons learned are equally applicable to students on other programmes, and at other levels.

Assessment for learning is one of the current buzz phrases in education. I have to confess to being under-whelmed. When I first heard a senior colleague chanting the assessment for learning mantra upon their return from a Primary National Strategy meeting, holding it up as a higher level of competence to which we could only dream of aspiring, I panicked. What was this mysterious nirvana that had been created?

There has been much discussion on the value of e-portfolios, their purpose, how they are used, the data they contain and indeed whether they are worth the trouble of setting up, maintaining and developing. In this Article, Ray Tolley outlines in great detail why e-portfolios can provide meaningful evidence to their importance. He believes an e-portfolio has a number of essential characteristics: portable, personal, generic, flexible, lifelong and credible.

This Article is taken from a paper which suggests that the advantages of social networking may stimulate stronger and more influential collaborative knowledge building for professional communities of educators. It poses the question 'What is braided learning?' in the context of online communities of practice (C0P) with particular reference to the MirandaNet experience.