As a member of the N4L support team I have taken plenty of calls over the last few months from educators about Pond. If you have called to ask about uploading images or changing your school name then the chances are you have heard me say “Welcome to Pond support, you’re speaking with Luke”.
The Pond team are always looking at your feedback in an effort to decide where to take Pond next so I thought I would share with you some great new features that have just been added.
- Buckets:
Adding items to the catalogue in Pond is a great way to share what you are passionate about but sorting through them can become a big job as the number of your contributions increases. Buckets are here to save the day! Items can be grouped together under a single bucket to make finding your items easier. Collecting resources for a new unit? Make a bucket for the unit and throw in items to your heart’s content. Oh and yes, you can have a bucket of buckets. - File uploads:
Sharing links to web resources has been a great way to get Pond up and running and there is so much amazing content out there on the net. But let’s face it, sometimes you just want to upload that Word doc that you stayed up to 2 am typing or that amazing slideshow that you use all the time. You can now upload your worksheets, lesson plans, PowerPoints, exemplars and other typical documents for other educators to discover. Just make sure you have permission to upload your documents! - NZQA tags:
This feature will be of particular interest for all our friends who teach at the secondary level. NZQA tags have been added to Pond in a uniform fashion and now make marking your content easier than ever! Adding an achievement standard to an item you add is really easy and when clicked, reveals more details. Need more info? The link to the NZQA site with the relevant standard is just one more click away.
There’s plenty more in Pond for you to explore such as how you can search for items in the catalogue. You can always search by keyword as normal, but now you can narrow your search by sector, subject and content level. Also, if you like something in Pond, why not give it a ‘Ka Pai’? Not only does it indicate to others that you think it is useful, it will show up under the ‘Me’ tab in Pond which means it also acts as a way of marking something as a favourite item.
These new developments are just the beginning for Pond so make sure you watch this space to see what’s coming up next. For those of you lucky enough to be attending ULearn, have a great time and for those who can’t make it, sign into Pond now and check out these great new features. What are you waiting for!?