Education reforms have made important structural changes, in particular, the inclusion of Arts Education among the Key Learning Areas in the school curriculum and the launch of a five-year information technology (IT) in education strategy . This has generated the need for a strong field-based leadership that would bring together various stakeholders in education to collaborate on initiatives encouraging and supporting educational innovation in the reformtargeted areas. This paper describes an initiative within the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd) called Alliance for Educational Innovation which plays a leadership role in implementing new visions of teaching and learning in cultural subjects. It discusses its several lines of work in areas such as teacher collaboratives, professional development, information dissemination, and development of educational technology resources that will contribute to the improvement of cultural subjects education in technology-rich environments.

This paper examines the potential of using Web-based technologies in cross- curricular education and iden1fies the need for a locally based site for teaching and learning. In addition, ii also gives an analysis of a local research project called "Project Crucial", which is developed by the present authors, and discusses the use of Information Technology (IT) to turn schools from "content factories" to higher academic learning and communication centers.