Linda Tame is a member of the N4L Board, selected for her years of service to the education sector and her long experience as Principal. Linda told us how she thinks Pond will make a difference to education in New Zealand.
Pond has the potential to create quite a splash in our schooling system. Here we have, for the very first time, a safe but exciting place for teachers to not only quickly access quality information for their teaching and learning planning, but the ability to share their creations, and adapt others’ creations for their own use, and these others can be anywhere in New Zealand.
Back in the 1980s, once a month I used to head to the Christchurch vegetarian restaurant Dux de Lux, with a banda copy (yes the smelly purple print) of a resource I’d created to share with a group of female Maths teacher colleagues. I’d head home a few hours later after a glass of wine and a fried kumara ball, clutching a small pile of resources to try over the next weeks. We were experimenting to try to improve outcomes for our female students, so I’d re-arrange my teaching programme to fit the resources. Next month we’d reflect back our experiences and share a new set. It was fun, but time consuming and slow, and resources driving the learning outcomes is inside out.
I found one of the big challenges in my 16 ½ years as a Principal was to encourage and foster quality teaching and learning collaboration with other schools, and therefore innovation, without bogging teachers down with huge work loads or simply frightening them by the prospect. At times we had fabulous relationships with other schools, but for some of the individual teachers these weren’t always productive, because the networking wasn’t personalised for them.
This is why Pond is such a potential game changer. For teachers who don’t want to share, they can easily search and use resources. For those who are just itching to create and share, they can do so even if the environment within their own team or school is not conducive. A day 1 teacher doesn’t need to feel shy – they won’t appear to be an arrogant upstart. An experienced teacher lacking motivation or fresh ideas can be re-inspired by seeing what is new and what is working around the country, without anyone knowing!
Pond is a truly personalised approach to collaboration and creating best practice. I for one can’t wait to see the positive impact as it ripples through our schools. If I were back in my job at Lincoln High, I’d be itching to get our teachers involved.
And… that’s without even talking about students! When they get hold of it, wow!