1. What surprises me about this piece from BOLD, How to support highly sensitive children in class, is the very high percentage of children who are affected by a condition I’ve never heard of! https://boldscience.org/how-to-support-highly-sensitive-children-in-class/

Imagine if every sound, sight, or emotion felt a little bigger, brighter, or more intense. That’s how life can be for the 30% of children who are highly sensitive to their environment. Being highly sensitive is a natural, genetically based temperament trait—not a disorder or clinical condition. Highly sensitive children process thoughts and feelings more deeply and often react more strongly to stimuli like noise, light, or sound. This can make school a challenging environment.

2. The British Council has tweaked its Continuing Professional Development (CPD) framework for teachers. Here’s the details https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/professional-development/teachers

and here’s the new framework itself https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/sites/teacheng/files/2025-04/CPD%20Framework%20for%20teachers%202025%20-%20Guidance%20Booklet.pdf PDF below as well.

3. DuoLingo is growing hugely with the help of AI, this recent press release of theirs tells us: Duolingo Launches 148 New Language Courses https://investors.duolingo.com/news-releases/news-release-details/duolingo-launches-148-new-language-courses

Duolingo, the world’s leading mobile learning platform, today announced the launch of 148 new language courses, more than doubling its current offering and marking the largest expansion of content in the company’s history. This launch makes Duolingo’s seven most popular non-English languages – Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin – available to all 28 supported user interface (UI) languages, dramatically expanding learning options for over a billion potential learners worldwide. “Developing our first 100 courses took about 12 years, and now, in about a year, we’re able to create and launch nearly 150 new courses. This is a great example of how generative AI can directly benefit our learners,” said Luis von Ahn, CEO and co-founder of Duolingo. “This launch reflects the incredible impact of our AI and automation investments, which have allowed us to scale at unprecedented speed and quality.”

4. Ethan Mollick’s latest post on his blog, One Useful Thing, Personality and Persuasion: learning from sycophants, reports more than a little worryingly on how easy it is to tweak the personality of Large Learning Models https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/personality-and-persuasion

Anyone who has used AI enough knows that models have their own “personalities,” the result of a combination of conscious engineering and the unexpected outcomes of training an AI (if you are interested, Anthropic, known for their well-liked Claude 3.5 model, has a full blog post on personality engineering). Having a “good personality” makes a model easier to work with. Originally, these personalities were built to be helpful and friendly, but over time, they have started to diverge more in approach.

5. And, finally, yesterday was the fiftieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon. Here’s a free piece from History Today https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/fall-saigon and here’s one of many iconic photos of that day from Wikipedia