Microsoft Live@edu and Moodle are used synergetically to provide students with a collaborative platform that is highly flexible and user-friendlyIT operating costs are lowered while enhancing communication and collaboration

K. International School Tokyo (KIST) was founded in 1997 with the vision of providing a safe, unbiased and fair environment where students of various backgrounds and capabilities can obtain a high-quality, international education. In April 2011, KIST switched is educator e-mail from a hosted service to Microsoft's Live@edu. This not only allowed the school to extend e-mail accounts to students, but also enables students to access Microsoft Office Web Apps and Windows Live SkyDrive. With the addition of Moodle, an open source platform in use for many years, the school is making a great transformation in the educational scene.

■ Background and Goals

Seeking a highly cost-effective system Introduction of the long-contemplated Live@edu

KIST is a secular, co-educational private school for students from

kindergarten to twelfth grade (third year of Japanese high school).

Founded in 1997, it currently has a student population of about 600

representing some 50 countries.

Regarding KIST’s founding principle, School Director Yoshishige

Komaki says: “It was originally an English school. But, after hearing

from parents and guardians about the high cost and inaccessibility of

international schools in Japan, I began to conceive a system whereby

students could acquire a high-quality international education at the

lowest possible tuition. The result was KIST.” According to Mr. Komaki, providing all students

with an affordable, world-class education that will help them fulfill their dreams for the future

is of paramount importance.

KIST employs the International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum, whose aim is to let students ac-

quire the skills they will need in society, with a focus on the capacity to “understand,” “think”

and “communicate” by the individual. By practicing this kind of education, KIST has been suc-

cessful in sending many of its students on to prestigious institutions such as Princeton Uni-

versity, The Wharton School of the University

of Pennsylvania, and Boston University.

Mr. Komaki says that while his school uses IT

as a tool to support a well-balanced educa-

tion, it does not engage in IT-reliant educa-

tion. He explains, “IT utilization is restricted in

many parts of the world. Providing education

that is purely centered on IT would result in

people who cannot function without being

connected to some kind of IT environment.

Solution Overview

K . In t e r n a t i o n a l S c h o o l To k yo

ProfileK. International School Tokyo (KIST) is an international school founded in 1997 for the purpose of providing a high level of education in an international setting. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government accredited KIST as an educational corporation in July 2000. Its curriculum is set in compliance with the International Baccalaureate (IB) and its aim is to sequentially provide the knowledge and skills necessary to succeed in the global economy. Some 50 countries are represented in its student body, and admissions are monitored to ensure a diversity of cultural backgrounds and to prevent any one nationality from dominating the student population.

Scenario• As part of its efforts to maintain close contact with

students and their guardians, KIST switched from a conventional hosted e-mail service to Microsoft® Live@edu to take advantage of its highly functional e-mail service for multiple accounts held by educators, students and guardians, and to reduce the volume of work related to account management.

• Using Windows Live® SkyDrive® and Web Apps creates an environment that allows access to documents and information by educators and students from anywhere, any time. Thanks to SkyDrive, disk memory capacity was also increased from 100MB to 25GB.

• In order to realize an IB-compliant curriculum, KIST combined the open source software Moodle with Live@edu to improve its learning platform and provide students with an environment that lets them study autonomously, anytime, anywhere.

Software and Services• Microsoft® Live@edu• Outlook Live• Windows Live® SkyDrive®

• Moodle (open source software)

BenefitsAt KIST, the introduction of Live@edu enables the low cost provision of e-mail services to 1,000 accounts, including all students and their guardians. Microsoft® Office Web Apps creates an environment whereby students can have access to digital material and information and store it on SkyDrive. The interaction of Moodle and Live@edu allows for the utilization of multiple tools with a single log-on to improve students' learning environment and promote the practical application of the IB curriculum, giving students the skills they will need later on in life.

User Comments“The combination of Live@edu and Moodle greatly changed the educational scene. For schools, it spurred innovation by customizing education. Letting students study when and where they want--not only at school but also at home--by accessing an online portal is a monumental achievement. Live@edu is a fantastic service, and I want to show the world how great this tool is.”

Christian Thompson Education Technologies IntegratorK. International School Tokyo

Yoshishige KomakiSchool DirectorK. International School Tokyo

K. International School Tokyo

K . I n t e r n a t i o n a l S c h o o l To k y o

Therefore, we teach students to use IT merely as

one tool among many others.”

According to IT Manager Toshiyuki Naito, “IT

plays a very important role” in the IB curriculum

offered by the school. For KIST's education to

work seamlessly, the system and network have

to be readily accessible to any student at any

time. This is the mission of the IT Team, headed

by Mr. Naito, which set up a wireless LAN

environment accessible by PC anywhere in the

school in 2010.

However, at KIST, whose founding principle is to

keep tuition as low as possible, a recurring issue

is what to get and in what order of priority in

light of a limited budget. Education Technolo-

gies Integrator Christian Thompson had the

following to say about IT costs. “The student

is our highest priority. After we have provided

for them we think about our other priorities,

such as teachers and staff. That's the pecking order when it comes to

the IT budget. Whether certain software is cheap or free is not what's

important. The question we ask when deciding whether to purchase is,

whether or not it will prove useful to students. However, if a free ver-

sion will provide the same results and there are no negative impacts on

the end user, then our preference is for freeware.”

Although KIST formerly used a hosted e-mail service, it switched to

Live@edu because of its wider range of applicability and ease of ad-

ministration and operation. IT Software/Hardware Coordinator Robert

Whittaker says “I read about Live@edu in an American IT magazine

before it was available in Japan. I thought it could work really well at

KIST. Its highly functional e-mail service and ability to provide students

and staff online access to their digital material 24/7 and the single

data store synced to multiple devices model is what caught my eye.”

■ Benefits of Introducing Live@edu

Accounts provided to all students and guardians Integrated administration lowers costs

The conventional e-mail service that KIST used

previously only allowed accounts for educa-

tors, and using e-mail to communicate with

students was problematic, explains Mr. Whit-

taker. “Students would send files to their own

e-mail address in order to do homework, and

then send the homework back again by e-mail.

Students would often create e-mail addresses

using free mail services, and keeping track of all

these addresses was a constant headache. This

was especially so for students in grades 8 to 10 (second year of junior

high to first year of high school), where there are a great many classes

and students.”

Managing the e-mail addresses of guardians for communications with

educators also proved a big headache for Mr. Whittaker. According to

him, guardian e-mail addresses would vary from providers to mobile

phones to free Webmail. Some people would change their e-mail

frequently, while others would not be able to receive or view attach-

ments, and some had problems with school messages going into their

spam mailboxes. Such barriers blocked communication in many cases.

“I thought that if we used Live@edu, we could provide e-mail address-

es to every student and guardian free of cost and, since it’s managed

on a shared platform, any problem that arises could be handled and

quickly resolved by ourselves.”

Presently, KIST provides accounts to educators as well as to students

in 5th grade and 11th and 12th grades (second and third years of

high school) on a pilot basis to gauge the need for Live@edu at each

grade level. In the future, the school plans to increase the number of

accounts to about a thousand. Mr. Naito says, “when considering the

enormous volume of e-mail from students and their guardians, as

well as educators, the cost of on-premise or hosted e-mail service is

unimaginable. An on-premise system would also entail costs for man-

agement, operation and maintenance, making it out of the question.

Live@edu is the only viable service for students.”

Before its eventual introduction, KIST also deliberated on the merits

of other competing services made for educational organizations.

However, as Mr. Whittaker explains, Live@edu won out for the fol-

lowing reasons. “The school needs to provide access to a massive

amount of existing information and documents created over a period

of ten to twenty years. Other Web applications are often incapable of

maintaining the format of documents created with different or previ-

ous versions when attempting to open them. In contrast, Live@edu's

Office Web Apps allow document viewing without any problem and

assure backward compatibility. Since we have been using Microsoft®

Windows® for years, Live@edu was naturally able to link the school's

infrastructure to the Web.”

Mr. Whittaker goes on to say that, in addition to the above, Windows

Live SkyDrive offered by Live@edu is another one of its appealing

features. “Before, our file servers could only provide 100MB of storage

capacity per student. Now, thanks to SkyDrive, each student can have

25GB, or 250 times more storage, at no cost. This is a huge advantage.

Further, USB memory devices were sometimes used to store files, but

students would sometimes lose them, or they would suddenly become

inaccessible. The ability to store everything online is a great help.”

In the future, KIST plans to provide not only students and guardians

but also alumni with e-mail accounts. This will allow alumni to keep

in touch with educators on the one hand, and have the dual effect of

enabling communication between those alumni and current students.

An example of this would be a current student receiving advice from

Toshiyuki NaitoIT Manager K. International School Tokyo

Christian ThompsonEducation Technologies IntegratorK. International School Tokyo

Robert WhittakerIT Software/Hardware CoordinatorK. International School Tokyo

an alumni of KIST who already has gone on to a university where that

student wants to go after graduation.

■ Live@edu Collaborative Effects

Accessibility from anywhere with a single log-on Successful transformation of the educational scene

Yet another reason for the adoption of Live@edu was the ability to

expand its functionality through combination with Moodle, which KIST

has used since September 2010 as an open source free study platform

for students. Moodle, whose many users include large universities is an

open source e-Learning system that allows instructional Web pages to

be created on the Internet.

Live@edu's Microsoft® Live Services Plug-in for Moodle allows func-

tions such as e-mail, scheduling, instant messaging and Web searches

to be used in Moodle. Mr. Whittaker explains that “although there are

other services that are compatible with Moodle, what convinced me to

get Live@edu is Microsoft support. Microsoft® Education Labs (http://

www.educationlabs.com/) features a ’Live Services Plug-in for Moodle‘

page where questions can be answered by the Moodle user commu-

nity. This is an extremely important feature.”

The Microsoft Japan Education Team peeked

into a 5th grade class and saw students draft-

ing documents using local Microsoft® Publisher,

Microsoft® PowerPoint® and other software,

then save them on SkyDrive and manage them

on Moodle. This particular lesson had students

decide on their own study topic, then assemble

in groups to pursue that topic. Although they

only started using the system a month be-

fore, students were already familiar with all the tools. Here are some

student comments we heard: “I show what I wrote to other members

of my group, get their opinions and then make corrections by check-

ing facts online without ever using the printer,” “it's really convenient

because I can use all kinds of tools just by entering my password and

logging in once,” and “material stored on SkyDrive can be accessed

with just a click!”

Suzanne Astrop, who is in charge of 5th graders, had this to say. “I can

upload the documents and videos I want students to see on SkyDrive

and then create links in Moodle. Students are getting used to shar-

ing documents, collaborating, swapping ideas and working together.

Raising their consciousness as team members and sharpening their

communication and collaboration skills will undoubtedly come in

handy after they graduate and get a job. I always tell them how I envy

them for having all these great tools that I never would have dreamed

of having when I was their age.”

Uploading an edited document on SkyDrive and creating a link to

that document on Moodle makes it accessible by any student just by

logging on from any terminal anywhere. Ms. Astrop explains that “with

Live@edu, students can continue at home the lessons they did in class.

Constricting a student to only classroom time would just create stress.

By letting him or her work at home, there's no time pressure and the

things learned in school can be expanded at home with family mem-

bers.”

“Staff members also save time and effort thanks to the integration of

multiple tools,” says Mr. Thompson. “The educational scene has been

greatly transformed thanks to the combination of Live@edu and Moo-

dle,” he goes on, “KIST uses them as an innovation that customized

its education. Letting students study whenever they want, not just at

school but also at home by accessing our web service, is an enormous

step forward. Whether during school holidays or even the overseas

Children using the serviceMoodle screenshot

StudentsComputer class at the school

StudentsPC at home

TeachersPCs at school and at home

Multiple services accessible with one user ID

and password

Windows Live ID

Internet

Hosting using a server

SkyDrive Messenger Outlook Live

Microsoft Live@eduMoodle

Suzanne AstropElementary School Faculty Grade 5A K. International School Tokyo

K . I n t e r n a t i o n a l S c h o o l To k y o

evacuations we saw after the March 2011 earthquake, students were

able to continue learning just by logging on anywhere. Live@edu

is a tool that is changing the way we teach. Before, educators with

exclusive possession of knowledge would convey that knowledge to

students in a one-way flow. However, we are now living in an era when

students are using online tools to create knowledge themselves. We

believe that the tool we should use for that purpose is Live@edu.”

Ms. Astrop added, “this year, after we added Live@edu to Moodle, I

started seeing my job change drastically right before my eyes. My role

now is more than just teaching. I expose kids to various bits of knowl-

edge, bringing to their attention different matters and asking them

how they feel about them. The educational environment is changing

exponentially.”

Mr. Komaki explains that this evolution is in step with KIST's phi-

losophy. “One of our founding principles was to provide a place for

children. A place that is a source of peace-of-mind engendered from

the constant support we give them, both while they are with us here

at school and after they have gone home, by answering all their ques-

tions using Live@edu and Moodle. This tool is not just about educa-

tional support, but also psychological support. Live@edu and Moodle

are becoming extremely important tools that allow for unprecedented

communication with students.”

■ Future Outlook

Utilization as a communication network in times of disasters Desire to broaden the benefits of Live@edu

KIST would like to see the Live@edu service it introduced after the

March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami be utilized as a communica-

tion network in future emergency situations.

Mr. Whittaker states that “the recent large-scale disaster reminded us

of the importance of rapidly communicating the status of students

and other vital information to guardians immediately after such an

event occurs. For example, we are now thinking of establishing a

system whereby emergency e-mail addresses would be set up by the

school and guardians would set up mail rules to ensure that any e-

mails from those addresses would be forwarded, assuring that emer-

gency communications could be received anywhere, anytime. Such an

arrangement would be simple and easy with Live@edu and our job

gets even easier when we teach guardians how to manage the system

and use it depending on the situation.”

“Live@edu is a fantastic service that I want to continue using and

expanding,” proclaims Mr. Thompson. KIST has great expectations for

Live@edu's successor “Office 365 for Education” and it is also very

interested in interfacing with Microsoft® SharePoint® Online and com-

munications via Microsoft® Lync™ Online.

Looking towards the future, Mr. Thomson explains that “there are

many schools that want to have some kind of IT system, but are

constrained by their limited budgets. Live@edu is a great solution for

such schools because of its compatibility with other tools and strong

support network. I would like Microsoft to promote this tool widely,

and we'll do our part to tell the world just how great it is.”

Mr. Komaki passionately asserts that “KIST's goal is to be number 1

in the world. Not in name recognition, but the number 1 school for

students. Presently, the IB curriculum is creating a type of education

that fosters students’ ability to think and make choices for themselves.

However, times change rapidly, and we will be careful not to sit on

our laurels, but continually strive for education that is founded in the

future. Our mission is to constantly provide education that will benefit

our children, while taking appropriate advantage of IT capabilities.”

This case study can be viewed online at the following URL: http://www.microsoft.com/japan/showcase/Please note that the information appearing in this case study is based on information available at the time of preparation (July 2011) and may be subject to change.This case study is intended for informational purposes only. Microsoft does not guarantee any of the statements made herein, either explicitly or implicitly.For product inquiries, please refer to the following.■URL: http://www.microsoft.com/japan/■Microsoft Customer Information Center: 0120-41-6755(9:30am to 12:00pm and 1:00pm to 7:00pm except weekends, national holidays and company-designated holidays)

Microsoft, Lync, Outlook, PowerPoint, SkyDrive, Windows Live, and Windows are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

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A typical class