N4L opens Pond up to wider Kiwi community

“Pond is designed to act as a central hub for digital discovery and participation."

Network for Learning is making online learning hub Pond more accessible by allowing its registered users - currently 8200+ teachers - to make the learning materials they add to Pond’s fast-growing catalogue available for public viewing.

From today, teachers can chose to make every contribution they add to Pond’s online catalogue available for ‘public viewing’.

This means items set for public viewing inside Pond are visible to anyone who searches for that topic on the web while links to Pond resources marked for public viewing can also be shared via email and social media.

Since Pond was introduced to teachers in the middle of last year, the community has blossomed to include over 8600 users.

Most are teachers, with the other 333 users being organisations offering content and services relevant to the education sector with more than 1000 new Pond users signing up to the digital hub every month.

Chris South, who leads Pond’s development team as N4L’s Head of Dynamic Services, says allowing greater visibility of quality learning resources benefits everyone.

“Pond is designed to act as a central hub for digital discovery and participation, to help educators discover and share resources, and to facilitate connections and collaborations within the teaching community,” he says.

“Allowing teachers to share their contributions and lesson plans more widely makes it easier for those who are not yet inside Pond to find information about how other educators across New Zealand are approaching curriculum topics and fulfilling NCEA achievement standards.”

South says the default setting for all Pond user contributions is private. Each user needs to manually set each item they publish in Pond to be publicly visible, otherwise it is only accessible to registered Pond users.

Inside Pond, teachers can follow and connect with other teachers around the country who share a mutual interest or speciality teaching subject.

According to South they can share best practices and learn from their peers, growing their own knowledge and networks, and adding to the strength of the Pond community as a whole.

All of Pond’s content is created by its user community, where it can be tagged, reviewed, bundled with other items and shared with registered users.

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