Singapore's Ministry of Education and 30,000 teachers go Google

 The Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE) is going Google, the first government ministry in Asia to do so. The MOE announced this week that it will be making Google Apps Education edition available to more than 30,000 teachers and staff members at over 350 schools in the country by the end of this year. The winning tender was awarded to NCS, Google's large enterprise solutions partner in Singapore, and to Google, providing the Google Apps online communications and collaboration suite to all public school teachers. We'd like to welcome all of them to the Google Apps community.
The MOE chose to move to the cloud to transform the public education sector through Web 2.0 technologies and a constant stream of product innovation and free upgrades with Google Apps. Chan Tee Miang, the MOE's CIO, also highlighted the benefits for Singapore's teachers, explaining that "this is a key project for MOE as it will facilitate collaboration and sharing among our teachers and help enhance their teaching practices."

James Kang, Assistant Chief Executive, Government Chief Information Office at the Infocomm Development Authority, said that the adoption of a cloud computing solution for MOE email and apps, "is in line with the government’s key criteria of ‘fit for purpose, value for money’ in infocomm procurement for the public sector.”

The new system is built on Google's distributed cloud computing platform with higher scalability, redundancy and flexibility to cater for unforeseen increases in usage and future upgrades without the need to re-architect the entire system infrastructure.

Google Apps Edu will provide each teacher with more storage space of 7GB (the current email system only provides 110MB of disk space) and better, up-to-date features for their email as well as bring collaboration apps like Google Docs and Google Sites into the mix. The end result will be to increase productivity, share knowledge and enhance the teaching and learning environment in schools all across the nation. The rollout starts in November and should be completed by the end of the year, just in time for the new school year to start in January, 2010.Singapore's Ministry of Education and 30,000 teachers go Google