N4L is making online learning hub Pond more accessible by allowing its registered users – currently 8,200+ teachers – to make the learning materials they add to Pond available for anyone to view.

From today, teachers can chose to make what 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. Links to Pond resources marked for public viewing can also be shared via email and social media.

For example, St Patrick’s College teacher Douglas Walker has chosen to share a video of a flaming ethanol bottle rocket, which he’s added to the catalogue. He tagged the item as being useful for NCEA Level 1 Physics, so now anyone searching for learning resources on this topic can discover it when searching Pond or via search engine like Google. Similarly, Green Bay High School teacher Heather Eccles has grouped a collection of human rights resources into a “bucket” within Pond and made it available for public viewing.

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.

“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.”

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.