What is an ILE - innovative learning environment?

The huge changes taking place in education throughout New Zealand are not just isolated to our country.  This shift or move to what the Ministry of Education initially called MLE's or modern learning environments but has now more accurately been coined ILE or innovative learning environment, has been rippling throughout schools around the world.  With all this change, comes a lot of confusion.  Many parents and even teachers are grappling with the new jargon/terms and even the purpose for the change to teaching practice and a new way of learning for our tamariki.

This video is a fantastic resource by some of our leading educators worldwide, that supports and explains what an innovative learning environment is, what changes you can expect and most importantly - why.

Take a moment to watch this and consider what they are saying.  I found what they were describing to be hugely inspiring and motivating and as a mother, this is exactly what I wish for my child's education.

It gives me great hope and excitement about our journey to create an innovative learning environment at our kura and about the kind of amazing tamariki that innovative learning systems will no doubt produce!

Whaea T :)

Effectively communicating through the use of Blogs

What is a blog?

A blog is a frequently updated online personal journal or diary. For our purposes we’ll say that a blog is our own website that we are going to update on an ongoing basis. 'Blog' is a short form for the word weblog.

Why use a blog?

Cobham Intermediate is fully committed to working in partnership with it's staff, students, whānau and community to ensure we are doing the very best for our learners. We are in a time where technology allows us unprecedented access to a wider audience and we want to maximise the opportunity to communicate openly and honestly with our school community about some of the major changes that are occurring in education worldwide, nationally, locally and of course, right here at our school.

Who will be blogging here?

In the beginning, most of our posts will be directly from one of the senior leadership team members who are also members of the school re-build committee. They are Scott Thelning - Principal, Tamara Bell - Deputy Principal and Peter Fowler - Assistant Principal. In time, we will invite other staff who have things to share relevant to our community to write a post and we also would like to see some of our students write guest blogposts too!

What can I do?

We encourage you to save the URL address of our blog and come and visit it regularly to keep up to date with what is going on. You can subscribe to our blog to receive email updates too (see the right navigation bar). We also would love to hear you thoughts, questions, feedback and ideas so please feel free to leave us comments on the blog too.

Ngā mihi nui, Tamara Bell (D.P)