Industrial relations

I am in the process of getting industrial quote for kits to make the cardboard cam designs shown below. I have an industrial background, but I have been struck by the difficulty of dealing with industry, even with my insiders perspective. Even when you understand whats going on and request a quote, you may not be able to read it or fully understand the implications of buying tooling or delivery schedules because many industries have arcane practises such as'looking after the mould for you' or You ordered a thousand but we deliver by the pallet load and thats 800, or We need space to drive the 42 ton delivery lorry and for the forklift truck to offload at your (ware) house. I have sorted these problems out in good time, but it reminds me of a practical exercise I did with a group of yr11 pupils, studying Resistant materials.

Using a speakerphone, they phoned up a local branch of B&Q and asked for Medium Density Fibreboard, 2400mm x 1200 mm x 12mm and got a price of £14. Another pupil then phoned up ten minutes later and asked for 8' x 4' x 1/2" MDF and got a price of £18. Interesting result as they are exactly the same thing!

Forunately the internet has made it a great deal simpler since then to get comparative price quotes, but as with any aspect fo life, the first time you do something, it will always be more intense and take much longer than later!

Here are a few things described industrially for you to guess what they are... and where they are used

Gross of No.2 BZP Twinfast CSK 15mm

Parana 44mm PAS 2.4m

100W BC cap

2x2GB DDR2

16x 4.7GB

Answers later

Sketchup Course

Almost daily, people are amazed by the breadth of uses to which Sketchup can be put. Roman buildings, bridges, comparing volume in mathematics etc.. Therefore I have decided to work with the Top valley And Nat Puri Engineering Centre in Nottingham, UK, to offer a one day course in Sketchup, and how it can creatively be used to bolster teaching.

You may be a PE teacher wishing to make 3D tactics boards or a school thinking about a new extension. maybe a graphics or food teacher wanting to put pupils packaging designs on actual 3D boxes and then on a supermarket shelf. You may be a teacher of history who wants to use 3D models of planes such as the Wright Brothers flyer to show how brave these people were, or a geaography teacher wanting pupils to assess the impact of a new supermarket by placing a model in Google Earth.

There are a choice of two dates, 4th December 2007 and 22nd January 2008. It costs £135 including a buffet lunch. For full details, please phone 0115 953 9060 and ask for the Engineering Centre

Stop Motion animation Ideas

This short film shows a Stikfa figure being used to create 'lifelke' movement. Stikfas have roughly the same range of joints and movements in their main limbs that we have. This makes them ideal for stop motion animation.
Knocked this film up in 40 minutes using a cheap webcam, edited using Windows movie Maker, titles also added with movie maker and output as a 320 x 240 15fps wmv file
If you want more info, email me!

This caught my eye today - Very big in Japan and usually, where Japan leads, we tend to follow a few years later.
This blotch is a type of 2D (reads vertically and horizontally) barcode. By itself that is nothing new... BUT, there is free software available for almost all cameraphones which can extract the data from a snapshot picture.
You may wonder why this is so revolutionary, but the patch on the left contains 250 characters of information which is directly readable by a computer (which is what your phone is).

Normally the picture would have to be processed using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software which extracts the data... QR Code is translated directly into computer readable information.
Imagine you are shopping and see a coat you like, you take a picture of you wearing it, but if you also take a picture of the 'QR' code on the label. This tells you the size, colour and other information in a format that your phone can store and transmit onwards by bluetooth or other technologies. being a picture, you can also send it in an MMS message, or convert it to text and txt it. There are various radio and tracker technologies available which are better than this.. but none cost almost nothing to implement... What about introducing this on all your pupils project sheets, or devise a hunting game where people had to track down clues by deciphering previous clues stuck to walls and ceilings?

For the record.. this is what the QR code says... and below is the link to generate your own!!

"This is a demo of a QR code generation image. It was created using the Kaywa free online code generator software and allows up to 250 characters (letters and spaces) to be embedded in the code and read by almost any cameraphone or scanner - ajbooker"

http://qrcode.kaywa.com/

Real Product Design

Teaching product design is a pain if you want pupils to make something they can test working that isn't a bottle opener or a hanger... The film here shows a small radio typically bought for £1 in the UK used as the basis for a project.

Here is the link mentioned in the video

In later blogs I will be showing you files and ideas for turning this into a product design project for year 9 and 10 (Ages 13-15) and a few tips on construction.

If you find this Blog useful, please be one of those who email me with feedback! I listen and adjust my posts according to your needs!

Teaching Mass and Inertia - with Skittles!

Needed a quick game to introduce concepts of design ideas, mass and inertia when visiting a primary school. Came up with this using a small bag of skittles sweets.

First I put a few skittles on each table and then asked people to stand by the table which had the most red, least yellow etc. Then explained that sometimes we came up with a design idea we were absolutely right was the best one. Then asked them to stand by the table with three sweets of the same colour. This time there was a couple of tables and used this to explain that sometimes there was more than one good idea and you had to choose the one you liked the best (flavour in this case!)

Then I put some masking tape a third of the way up the table and they played a game where they had to flick the sweets up the table into the green area beyond the tape. Any in that area got eaten by the 'flicker', all others including those which fall off the table are eaten by the opposing player. Used this to explain what mass was and how friction affected mechanisms. the rest of the afternoon we made clockwork mechanisms and referred back to the skittles experiment frequently.

Afterwards I thought, what a great idea! Took the idea to another school the next week and it bombed.... because no sweets were allowed to be given to kids and Kidney beans just don't work properly... If I was doing this with staff, I would use dark chocolate covered coffee beans and watch the opponents get more hyper as the caffeine kicked in!

New ways of learning

I ran a 3D graphics event in June for Gifted and Talented Children from across the Midlands. It was in how to use the free 3D program, Google Sketchup. It consists of about 14 units, each with sample files and an e-learning film showing how to use the particular skills taught in that unit.

I am in discussions to sell these films as a personal / group learning resource and they will soon be available to purchase online and download a set.

In the meantime, here's some screen dumps of the power point presentation and various models used in the films.

Computer Control for primary Schools

Recently advised a Primary School on what control equipment to buy to introduce the topic to staff and pupils. Went through 4 systems, starting with simple circuit boards you set up a sequence of commands with for about £6 each, through to specific education systems costing about £120. At the end, the head asked me..yes.. but whats the best system? I advised her it was 'LEGO NXT' and she promptly bought 5 kits. I hadn't included this in my list of 4 initially because of cost, but i think she chose wisely!

This may be a suprising choice for many schools, and certainly is not the cheapest option, being around £1000 for 5 kits and a site license for the essential NXT Mindstorms software, but it has many advantages. The pupils are not scared of breaking it, they are already skilled in assembling the components, the leads used are robust and cheaply replaced if they do break. Replacement parts are all numbered and cheap to buy, and finally, it is compatible with every other LEGO brick in the world.

Of course there are a a few downsides... 471 pieces, many tiny, is a big classroom managements headache so I suggested they bought some rather oversized rolling toolboxes big enoughto store all the bits, and with room for part built models in the base.

My favouite piece of techhie kit for school is the Roamer, a simple big disc shaped thing with buttons on. Someone very clever decided it should be powered by those huge square lantern batteries and therefore it went for ages and could be stored ina cupboard without losing charge... You can still buy them..but I would now buy NXT!

Short Change

I wrote a set of Structures worksheets for a DT department a few years ago that needed to be taught by all staff, regardless of technical ability in structures.

The sheets went through the basic types of structures and used only 'spills' the thin wooden sticks used to light Bunsen burners, and plasticine, along with a bit of paper and some wooden blocks for weights. It proved very successful but I noticed some of the kids did not use the materials in correct ways because the long sticks with their flat absorbent surfaces stuck to the plasticine so well that quite bizarre angles could be made, and the flat sticks could be stuck together along their length to make very rigid pieces.

In the last few weeks, I have developed a similar structures project using a set of 7 photocopied card project sheets onto which pupils build directly. I used plasticine again ( Actually 'modelling clay' as its much cheaper and the same stuff!) but this time used cocktail sticks which I bought very cheaply from www.rapidonline.com. The shorter sticks have a round cross section and are non-absorbent which means pupils ideas need building more carefully with proper triangulation if they are to be weight supporting structures.

The idea still needs refining, but I only asked for self-supporting structures, and in hindsight, they should have been load bearing ones. Often picking something common but tricky to hold works well, such as a packet of skittles sweets.

Gearbox Grindings

I have developed this gearbox for a client who is working in partnership with a power generation company and wishes to promote renewable energy information.

The gearbox uses extremely cheap PVC gears available from http://www.rapidonline.com/ and http://www.mutr.co.uk/ which come as a set of three gears to push fit onto a 3mm shaft and a pinion gear to push fit onto a standard 2mm electric motor shaft. I came up with the idea because the gearboxes already available needed a lot of parts and used fairly small gears, and cost a lot. As regular readers will know, bringing costs down to schools is essential as then projects can be individual or small group and be integreated into the regular SOW of a school.

The front and back plates are manufactured on a laser, but can also be made on a router using a 2mm cutter. The bolts holding it together are standard M4 ones, and the motor used as a power generator is a standard large size solar motor (http://www.mutr.co.uk/) .

It can be built with three combinations of gears giving ratios between 1:3 and 1:14 approx. These arc easily changed in about 3 minutes.

The total cost in parts to a school is about £2 and having fairly chunky gears with big teeth, it is robust. The longer plate, on the production version, is designed to be cut in 3mm plywood so that the gearbox can be screwed to a pole and then stuck in the ground for testing.

The client and I will be offering this design to a manufacturer to produce a kit in bulk. It is hoped that many schools can then benefit from this project.

Decent Coffee!

Since going full time as a consultant this January, I have worked in a lot of Cafe's and drunk a lot of coffee! This is because much of my development is better done in environments which are stimulating, so there is the table by the lake in Nottingham University, the Garden centre near Wollaton and the non-smoking pub which has free wireless access. Sitting in a box produces boxy ideas... Of course, lugging a 5kg laptop and bag around means I do not have a lot of license to wander around while set-up... so hence my new interest in Expresso. Proper Espresso, as described to me in a book by a fanatical chef, is tiny, not bitter, and has a 'crema', the bit that's a little frothy on top, that supports a teaspoon of sugar for up to 10 seconds.

Temperature, water, cleanliness of the cup, pressure, type and amount of Coffee and the amount it is 'tamped' before being put in one of those gargantuan machines are all critical.

It also means you don't have to nip to the loo all the time to eject excess fluids, leaving your laptop behind!

So why talk about Coffee on a Technology Blog? Because many of the stages in making a decent cup of coffee are ideal for a cross curricular project... Maths does the costings, ICT records temperature and pressure, Science collates, DT produces the perfect measure and 'tamperer'.
Even better, it is a project with an easily assessed outcome, using relatively cheap ingredients which almost anybody can give a qualitative and quantitative judgement on.... I also think the various Coffee companies littering the high street would jump, if properly presented' at the chance to do such a project and reap the substantial PR!

And finally, think how much livelier the staff room would be with all those free espresso samples available!

Laser Cutting

This little device was an idea I had a few years ago when first getting access to the type of small scale laser now common in secondary schools.

I developed this prototype over many hours and the final CAD file took about 12 minutes to cut on a 40w laser in 3mm plywood.

When I contacted companies to make it in bulk, I quickly discovered why making things in wood was rare today. Unless I had special patterns made in China to stamp out the pieces, and it wasn't certain such fine detail would be reproduced using this method, it would have to be cut out on industrial lasers in this country. It worked out about £12 a set of pieces cut which gave a final selling price in the shops of around £47 by the time other costs and the shops markup + VAT was added.

The sad thing is, I could have all the pieces made as plastic injection moulded parts for £1 (Flat plate mouldings) if I committed to buying 10,000 sets. This would give a final selling price in my targetted shops of about £7 which was acceptable. Of course, then it would be in plastic instead! We will rely less on plastic when it is either too expensive, or there are good industrial techniques and materials to replace it. I suspect we will reach that point in about 20 years.

If you do some research, you will find the most popular early plastic was Bakelite... And that was mostly sawdust! Of course, the second most popular..and available thousands of years before Bakelite..was tortoise shell!

Anyone want to try something new?

For the past 3 months I have sweated over a set of 4 schemes of work (units) for the University of the First Age, that teachers can take and use to run courses with children, and they are finally finished.

There are four. Pow-Zap, about using super capacitors.
Kinetic, about building large water powered sculptures.
NXT-H20, about solving a design problem using the LEGO NXT system.
2-Take, designing and prototyping an alternative bicycle load carrier.

If you contact the UFA, they should be able to give you more details about the units, and you might like to try running them yourself. The units contain a full SOW, technical details, online bookmarks, oodles of 3D models and 2D sketches, as well as powerpoint introductions and worksheets where required. The Schemes of Work alone run to about 36 pages so there's plenty of material to guide you!

TINY PICAXE DICE - MODULAR

The dice shown here is part of a set of 5 PCB's I developed in 2006 for a client. These haven't been tested yet so I am not sure if they will work as the client was intending to get pupils to trouble shoot them before a final version. They were created in 'Real PCB', a package I have used and up to now has been pretty similar to the other main educational PCB design package, 'PCB Wizard'.

I think I should express an interest in PCB 'Wizard' and its excellent successor, Circuit Wizard. I did some paid work for the company who makes the programs, but was hired after I was already using it with GCSE and KS3 pupils because of its excellence.

So why the dice picture? Firstly, I love to see how tiny I can make PCB's which are still usable / editable by pupils, and that are easily made as single sided boards. This one is about 45mm x 35mm if you stack the boards. With a little ingenuity, it should be possible to use a tiny 6 or 12v car alarm battery to power it and squeeze the whole onto the PICAXE PCB. I believe that with sample projects such as this that pupils learn on / with, it is important that you can see where the tracks go and understand how it works.

Secondly, It is part of a system where the base 8 pin PICAXE board acts as the starter for pupil projects, and they design the add-on bit. This may seem less satisfactory than designing the whole thing on one board, but as PICAXE 'headers' are part of all common PCB design packages, making it a discrete board seemed neater. It also means pupils are designing just the interface / outcome, not grappling with the whole board. Such an approach can give rise to track routing problems but there is no reason why connections on the pupil board could not be spaced around it rather than lined up in a row.

Thirdly, To tell you that there is a new version of Circuit Wizard due imminently. this will integrate together Circuit diagram, PCB layout and PICAXE programming into one interface. Then I will not have to wait for someone to test the idea above by building it. Instead it will be fully tested from within a single program. If it was available now, this article would be posted on my main website rather than here as a concept item!

I think that electronics has been the area of DT that has seen the biggest changes in the last 5 years. It is now extremely close to industrial methods of designing / testing and manufacturing one-off / prototype devices. Perhaps with the advent of such sophisticated technologies in schools, we should re-examine exactly which GCSE pupils should study. I was required to change to Product Design a few years ago from Electronics but still teach a mainly electronics based content. It wasn't a brilliant fit of subject and syllabus at the time, but it may prove ideal with such powerful software becoming mainstream.

Cheap Outcomes

I have a value I try to work to for the projects I develop for schools, especially Primary schools, of £1. Almost anyone can buy a kit costing £6 a child and produce a 'fun' activity, but to be sustainable, the building has to be part of a scheme / project and also cheap enough that it can be repeated each year and the results sold to the pupils (Allowed if the pupils take resources home).
This wind turbine as shown costs about 50p in bits, though I have used a rather expensive laser cutter to make the hub. If you use hand cut card circles for the hub, you have an extremely effective turbine which can be pushed through a cardboard box (Add beads to the shaft to act as a bearing or spacer) and you can add a pulley to make other mechanisms turn / move. They really work well. Put in the wind or in front of a fan, they spin extremely fast which is magic to a young child.

There is part of my work that is about new, shiny,cutting edge ideas. Things like this primary turbine remind me that to every class, every year, these are new projects they have never had the chance to try before. By keeping the cost down, everyone gets to make one and proudly take them home.

Chip Tray Hovercraft

This is an idea I developed for a client for Yr8 Engineering lessons. Having tried the chip tray hovercraft layout in TEP (http://www.tep.org.uk/) I had problems getting it to work as advertised. Found out I had the wrong power supercapacitor. Even though the one i had was labelled 2.5v and 10F (From the official supercap kit from http://www.mutr.co.uk/) , it was a third the size of another from http://www.rapidonline.com/ which was labelled the same. Turns out the bigger one had three times the capacity (time able to run things). It was also the same price as the smaller one and worked with 15p motors from Rapid. Once I swapped for the bigger capacitor, everything became easy. This version uses sticky pads and connector blocks and can be assembled in about half an hour. The information on making it that the pupils received didn't quite work. On purpose, the design made the hovercraft a little rear heavy and they had to resite / cut the card cowl to get it working effectively. Look at my earlier posts to find out about the magnetic connectors.

This model was, of course, done in Sketchup. It tested my ingenuity to draw a decent chip tray in Sketchup (Try It!) but once everything was in 3D, it was relatively easy to arrange the parts for powerpoint slides, exploded views etc. I have taken the same approach to recent work for other clients. A wind turbine I have developed for KS3 is a 3D model which allows me to very quickly generate pictorial worksheets.

The backgrounds are black because the files are actually .gif files with transparent backgrounds. Saved and placed over other graphics in PowerPoint, they work beautifully but Blogger does not support this feature.

Effective vehicle platform

Schools are often seeking a simple way of building cars and other wheeled vehicles without the complications of sorting axles and pulleys which can prove tricky for very small hands. Pupils, especially in primary school, want to build things that actually climb over sticks, go up 'hills' and 'work'.

This example uses a common module availble from www.rapidonline.com (Code 37-0310), and www.mutr.co.uk (Code TG1 010), for about £1.35. Partner with a simple battery box with built in switch (Sold by both rapid and mutr) and a couple of wheels and you have an inexpensive 'platform' for creating a strong capable vehicle.

And if you are worrying about costs, you can normally re-use all parts with care, or charge the pupils as if they're idea is good, and they are proud of it, virtually all pupils will bring in some money towards the cost!

Suspension Bridge

Here is an idea I am developing.

The bridge is made out of standard sizes / cuts of plywood and MDF. The finished packed bridge fits on the back seat 0f a standard car and should be liftable by two people.

Weights are foldable water containers.

With 100 litres (100KG) of water in each box, these act as the foundations the bridge is built off.

Participants work in teams of up to 10, competing against another team building another bridge, to build a working suspension bridge. Bridges are between 10 and 14 metres long...

Only consumable is the water, and a big ball of string!

This model wass built in Sketchup in 1 hour from scratch!

To test they must drive a glass of water over it on the back of a radio controlled car. Speed to cross and water left equals score usign a formula.

Should be building a prototype before the end of July 2007, and rolling it out to schools in East Nottingham City next academic year!

Edutainment?

Well meaning friends bought me a quiz programme for my Birthday recently. It proudly boasted 400 questions and after doing a standard test on it I came to the following conclusions

1. I am not good at intelligence tests
2. I could learn to be better at them
3. This program was not going to help me get better

After completing 40 questions, the program baldly told me what I'd got wrong but not why or how it should have been answered. Bad Consultancy is like that... you can tell people what's wrong, but not how to make it better. What I did learn, is that the disc flies really,really well.

Communication Strategies

I am writing this from home with a temperature and a sore throat which means Voice recognition software and recording voice-overs for e-learning films are very out!

This is a bit disconcerting because on Saturday i am running a whole day training event in Sketchup for 25 people and I have not been able to record the e-learning films for any of it yet as the clock ticks closer.

What this delay has done is force me to consider alternative strategies and consider if they are really 'second-best'. i have access to extremely sophisticated screen recording software but it is time consuming compared to clicking and speaking. Maybe what i will do in the end is reduce the amount of talking, even getting others to say prepared statements out loud which I will line up with the film in Windows movie maker. The result will probably be better precisely because it will be 'considered' instruction rather than a continuous stream of dialogue.

Also of course, the most melodious voice may eventually pale after a couple of hours of solid instruction. As they say... Out of adversity comes invention!

Micro Radio Controlled Airships

I bought a £5 radio control car at Christmas and have an idea to use the core mechanism to make a miniature radio control airship. I have run two radio control airship clubs in the past as Pupil/Parent activities, but they are restricted by the weight of the radio control equipment. Typically they used standard 2 channel radio gear and needed to use about 2 cubic metres to be effective. Go here for a film of them.

Using commercially available balloon gas which is 95% Helium, you get a lift of about 1kg per cubic metre. This is the TOTAL lift though so the weight of the envelope (Bit that contains the gas) and the radio gear and batteries and everything else must be lifted. The new generation of micro-cars weigh a few grams and it should be possible to build a simple airship with them. These pictures show some outline details. using the core module from the car. i expect the final airship to be around 1 metre long. If anyone is interested in more detail or wishes to sponsor a pilot, and receive full building details and a scheme of work then please contact me.

Super Capacitors and Polarisation

Supercaps are small battery like components. You connect them to power, they soak up some and then you can connect them to other devices. They don't store lots of power, but enough to run a simple motor for a couple of minutes maybe.

I am presently writing 4 units of work for The University Of The First Age based in Birmingham but actually countrywide in their influence. I needed a way to simply join super capacitors to motors etc. and have come up with this idea using the 'magnetic connectors' sold by www.mutr.co.uk and combining them with the standard 10 Amp electrical connecor blocks

It means you cannot (If wired correctly) connect the wires the wrong way round (Their Polarity) which means less chance of damaging these useful but expensive (£4 each) components!

Growing Ideas

Plant a seed, take care, watch and see it grow!

Today I read an article by a senior educationalist saying Pilot projects sshow that if you have an idea, run by interested people, with good financial backing... they make a positive difference to a child's education.

Pretty obvious, the trick is to spread that difference beyond the carefully nurtured 'pilot' ground.

I am organising a wind turbine pilot at the moment and one key outcome is reproducibility. I have worked with teachers to secure funding for one pilot, a fact finding series of trips for pupils, teacher development and training for the pilot, and finally two teacher training events at which we will give participants at least 2 cd's of material and multiple kits to take away and use in their own classrooms. In this way the project should grow beyond its initial pilot stage.

I have in front of me a £1500 cd/dvd automated disc copying machine and printer. With this, organisations hosting events can give teachers multiple copies of info to give to others. I thought at first that hosting the stuff online was the answer but writing and hosting huge media websites is far more time consuming and ultimately costly than knocking out a few CD's at less than £1 each. Some materials will go on youtube but most will be on the CD.

A pilot is like growing seeds in a greenhouse under ideal consitions... It will almost always work! The next stage is to find out how to grow those seeds in real soil and still get a good crop. All my future bids to funders will include teacher training events from now on.. to get them out of the greenhouse!

G&T D&T?

I am presently thinking about how a primary school can assess its pupils for Gifted ad Talented status in Design Technology. Sport, maths and other G&T areas are fairly simple, but what are you measuring for D&T?

I have chosen to pick three areas: Manual Dexterity, tested through assembling a simple kit, Organisation through how well they plan the kit assembly, and design through their proposed and recorded amendments to the kit.

This is a new activity in my consultancy but it builds upon the concept of Technology Education being about identifying needs and producing solutions.

As for what kit they will assemble, it is likely to be a simple Meccano clone. Spanners ready!

Engineering Centre Garden

Part of my weekly work is to be business and development manager of the only school based engineering centre in the country. The centre has only been open a few months and was still being sorted when it opened. Now an area at the front of the building is being turned into a 'garden' and seating area for visitors and young people being trained there.

So, I am asked about plants for the centre and immediately we see probelms. Blackberries are good as they are food plants but quickly the walls and carpets would turn purple.

Pyrocanthus would be a good choice as it is spiky and evergreen but would require care as again, the berries can be used for ammunition!

In the end we are going to choose a variety of plants but it is a good chance to realise that design is in every decision, not just the ones relating to hard materials!

Moan at the darkness

This is the first blog so here's to the future!

I ran an INSET this week for 11 people. As I am not a primary teacher, I feel it is wrong of me to give them in-depth schemes of work. As agreed with the client beforehand, the event focussed on analysing some QCA schemes to dump the verbiage and produce a clear concise list of 'objectives'.
Adding any stages necessary to turn it into a smooth flow gives you a rough scheme of work.

While planning for the event, I realised that the average QCA project is 1750 words long by itself. This doesn't include any DATA help files or exemplar work! And this is only one of many subjects a primary teacher will study to deliver.... Lets hope future curriculum reviews will recognise this.

The INSET also included a goodie bag for each participant. £10 worth of bits which will enliven teaching of DT without breaking the bank.... I will post the list and presentation on my website in June.

It was a hot day today in Nottingham and I took the group outside for half an hour. No power point and no teaching aids, just a circle of chairs and the sun in our eyes!

INSET is a time for reflection and discussion as well as learning. I have noticed recently that those teachers who should be in the best position to inspire their younger colleagues can sometimes major more on the downsides of teaching than the positives which can be very destructive when their younger colleagues are looking for reassurance.
I find teachers bemoaning their world and being less than open in taking on 'new ideas' difficult.

I spoke passionately but not necessarily eloquently about teachers needing to enjoy their subject, that fun was communicable to pupils and that we have to practise skills ourselves, much like we expect our pupils to, before we get better and gain confidence in new things.

Of course, it is much easier to preach these things than do them, it is easier to moan about the darkness..than light a candle!