HARNESSING THE POWER OF EMERGING CLOUD COMPUTING TO DEVELOP AND FOSTER A COLLABORATIVE SCHOOL COMMUNITY IN THE NEW DIGITAL AGE

In the new digital age, the way students use technology is constantly evolving. E-mail, social networking, Instant Messaging and Gaming are now all part of their daily experience. Increasingly, schools face the challenge to keep up with discerning students' technology needs. Because students are more technologically savvy than ever before, they expect their school environments to have rich, high-quality communications capabilities, like those they use in their social lives. Faced with this new generation of students, schools must be prepared to adapt to these changing e-learning dynamics in order to meet their learning needs. This paper describes how Ngee Ann Secondary School (Singapore) has tapped and harnessed the potential of the Web-based applications in the emerging cloud computing services to develop a collaborative school community with its own identity. The school has adopted Microsoft's Live@Edu at zero cost to harness a suite of applications to help students manage their studies, share information and resources, collaborate and communicate with other students and teachers on projects, and stay connected with friends in an increasingly Web-connected world.