HARNESSING THE POWER OF CLOUD COMPUTING FOR INTERDISCIPLINARY PROJECT WORK (IPW) IN NGEE ANN SECONDARY SCHOOL (SINGAPORE)

Project Work (PW) was formally introduced into the school curriculum as a major educational initiative by the Singapore’s Ministry of Education in 2000, as a result of the Ministry of Education’s concern to provide Singaporeans with high quality education that inculcates lifelong learning. One key feature of PW in Singapore is the strong emphasis on interdisciplinary where students are allowed to explore inter-relationships of subject-specific knowledge. In this way, students are able to extend their knowledge from their immediate environment to real-world issues and practices. PW provides a learning path for students to develop their self-directed inquiry, initiate work and present their ideas. Thus, PW represents a paradigm shift of the teaching and learning arena from teacher-centred to student-centred.

This paper describes how Ngee Ann Secondary, in order to provide a conducive learning environment which supports the student-centred learning in PW, has harnessed the power of emerging Cloud Computing to design an integrated online platform on Microsoft Live@Edu that helps to promote a cohesive social network among students and also their PW facilitators. Apart from having a suite of online applications that enable users to view and share files, the platform also allows embedding of other social media applications to add more interactivity, vibrancy and hype to their otherwise mundane blog entries.