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.