A bright sunny day in Whangarei was the perfect backdrop for 37 educators to leap into Pond for the first time. Armed with laptops and high resolution tablets our educators entered the room, soon they would be Pioneer Educators.
After a brief explanation of the evolution of Pond delivered by Carolyn Stuart, these Pioneer Educators launched into Pond for themselves. Immediately a murmur of excitement grew as people shared what they were finding in Pond. Comments were immediately made of “I wish I had this the other day when I was trying to get my class to research online”; the ability to translate the features of Pond to the classroom were apparent and the enthusiasm was growing.
Our Pond Pioneers in Whangarei added items to the Pond catalogue immediately commenting on how easy it was to do. They jazzed up their profiles attaching photos, even taking photos crowded around the camera on one computer! By the end of each workshop, each Pioneer Educator was confidently navigating their way around Pond adding items and searching for their colleagues – and their amazing profiles. Come 4pm, we had 37 more Pioneer Educators in Pond helping shape its digital landscape.
The participants of these workshops in Whangarei enthused about how useful Pond will be to planning and resourcing lessons as well as how easy to use the interface was. The speed the results were returned was a pleasant surprise to all Pioneers leaving them to reflect on how it will make planning faster and easier.
These workshops were the first of a series of physical and online workshops to be held over May. By the end of May, the landscape of Pond should be vastly different to how it currently looks as more and more Pioneers engage, develop their personal presence and add items to the catalogue. Of course, the reason we are asking Pioneers to do this rather than doing it ourselves is that N4L wants all of the items in Pond to be authentic, from teachers for teachers. To do this, we need teachers and educators to come on the journey of Pond with us.
