Teachers dive deep into digital Pond

Wairarapa teachers will join thousands of educators throughout New Zealand diving deeper into the Pond digital learning hub.

Crown-owned company Network for Learning (N4L) designed its managed network and the Pond learning hub for New Zealand schools, and the latest features of the system were revealed to more than 2000 educators, including teachers from Wairarapa, at the ULearn conference in Rotorua last week.

N4L spokeswoman Julie Landry said the company had linked almost 1000 schools in New Zealand to its network, which offered "fast and predictable internet with uncapped data web filtering and network security services" via a mix of ultrafast, rural and remote broadband.

She said more than 75 schools, representing about 2000 teachers nationwide, had signed on to the new Make A Splash programme that was revealed at ULearn. This term they would join the 1500 teachers already using Pond, which was a collaborative environment in which teachers could discover a wide range educational resources for classrooms and share them with their peers.

"The aim is to give schools equitable access to digital technologies that can enable new ways of learning and improve student achievement," Ms Landry said.

Solway Primary School teacher Steve Hornby said teachers were constantly searching for "new ways to engage our students and improve their learning" and the digital learning hub paved the way to novel approaches, resources and tools.

"Pond prompts us to consider alternative education resources that we may not have otherwise known about," Mr Hornby said.

"If a colleague teaching the same subject in another school has found an online programme that has helped get their students excited about a topic, then our teachers can see this in Pond and review the programme knowing that their peers have used it and liked it. It tells us that resource is worth investigating for our own use."

Primary school teacher Trudi Browne, who is introducing Pond to Burnside primary school teachers in Christchurch, said there had been a positive response to it. Pond offered users the capacity to search teacher profiles at other schools and "to go deep into the archives of Digital NZ and search video clips that are hard to find on regular search engines".

"Pond's search returns the more educationally useful material to the top of the list and this saves us time having to go look for them."

Chris South, N4L head of dynamic services, said teachers had been keen "to group items into related topics" within the Pond system.

"They can now bundle resources into 'buckets', and other teachers can easily view and share these buckets within Pond.

"We wanted to make it easier for teachers to see what their colleagues in other schools find interesting and useful for student learning and their own professional development."

Other new Pond features include a bookmark facility called Ka Pai, the capacity to directly upload documents, and a tool that let teachers save to Pond with a Chrome web browser, Mr South said.

Ms Landry said the rollout of Pond and the N4L Managed Network were running "a couple of months" ahead of plans. The Managed Network surpassed 700 connections almost five months ahead of schedule, with 928 schools connected to date.