MOE Adopts Open Standard Internet Email and Collaboration Services

The Ministry of Education (MOE), together with NCS Pte Ltd and Google, officially announced today that they are working together to make available the Google Apps (Education version) suite of online communications and collaboration tools to more than 30,000 teachers and staff in over 350 schools in Singapore by end 2009. This will make MOE the first Ministry in Singapore to adopt an open standard cloud computing platform and the first in Asia to provide Web 2.0 communication and collaboration tools to all teachers in the public school system.

The Google Apps for Education will offer better and up-to-date email features with bigger email disk space size of 7GB. This is a huge increase compared to the existing system which provides only 110MB of email disk space. (Wow, How did our teachers managed to survive with 110MB email disk space?) Features like calendaring, flagging of emails for follow-up, email to-do list are also included. It is also bundled with collaboration tools such as Instant Messaging, Blogs and Wikis which provide collaboration within and across schools.

There is no mention of Google Docs in the press release, but let’s hope it is also included in the system. It would be useful for teachers to collaborate with the help of cloud computing. Also, it would be good to see MOE extending this to students too.

For more info about Google Apps (Education version) suite, visit the website or check out the youtube video. (Skip to 8:56 if you want to skip the marketing pitch)