Richard+Lambert+-+Kalinda+Primary+School

Hi there! I'm Richard, or Richie or Rich, depending on which item of social media you're reading! Twitter: @richielambert or my blog: richlambert.edublogs.org or on Delicious: delicious.com/richlambert or on Diigo: diigo.com/user/richlambert. And if you're really keen you can check out actionstations.com.au to see a preview of my book.

I am the Assistant Principal of Kalinda Primary School, which is a school of 460 students in Ringwood. It's a very challenging role and definitely keeps me busy! I particularly enjoy leading the school's ICT program. This has been a huge challenge in a time of such rapid change. As a manager now of teachers as well as students, I have become particularly interested in how ICT can improve teaching practices in assisting a their organisation and assessment.

My teaching journey has been a bit of a whirlwind, and it was arrived at in a very roundabout way. After Secondary School I did a **Media Studies/Professional Writing degree** (hoped to be a script writer, discovered there are desperately few of them and even those few don't make much of a living from it! Completely failed a Neighbours audition...), followed by a **Diploma of Professional Children's Writing** (do you have any idea how hard it is to get a children's book published?? Lets just say I have a reasonably good idea...), and finally followed by a **Bachelor of Education** in which I trained to teach both Primary and Secondary. (Finally paid off my HECS bill as I started my AP position!!)

From this final degree I was beginning to feel I'd found my calling as a Secondary Media Studies/English teacher when I got a call out of the blue from the Principal of Ringwood North Primary School. From this phone call I thought I'd take a punt on teaching Primary for a year or two. So a few months after setting myself to teach VCE Media Studies I ended up in a Primary classroom....teaching grade 1!

Teaching grade 1 was a blast, but my story really kicks in to gear in my second year of teaching when I ended up teaching grade 6 with a guy by the name of Adam Brice. After 6 months doing 'the same old thing', we made a commitment to each other that we would go out on a limb and start doing new and different things. Lets get creative. Lets start setting our kids challenges and seeing how they respond. Well, what a ride we've both been on since!



Part of that ride was bringing my love of film and media studies into the Primary classroom. At the start of our second year together, Adam and I set our kids a challenge of running a short film festival at our local Hoyts Cinema complex. Crazy huh? 120 kids, 24 short films, a sold out 700 seat cinema. A wonderful experience.



A year later we were fortunate enough to win the Department of Education's Excellence Award for Most Innovative Curriculum.

A year after that we wrote a book about our experiences as so many teachers were ringing up wanting advice on how to run similar digital storytelling/film making programs.

A year after that we were approached by the Curriculum Corporation (now Curriculum Press) to re-write our book for them. It became the first book in their 'Action Stations' series and was simply titled 'Digital Storytelling'.

We did some fantastic stuff at Ringwood North, and the school is still going strong, currently being involved in the Victorian 1-1 iPad trials.

I, however, needed to move on, firstly to Tinternvale Primary School as Leading Teacher in charge of ICT, and then to my current position at Kalinda. Adam is currently the Assistant Principal at Ringwood North Primary School, and as it is one of Kalinda's neighboring schools I get to still work with him quite a bit which is great!

I am continually amazed at the dedication, commitment, skill and passion of so many teachers in this great state and around the world. I find Twitter in particularly so invaluable as it gives me an insight into their minds, their learning and their classrooms. Looking forward to working with some of those wonderful people through PLP this year!