National homework task to be set for World Mental Health Day
- World Mental Health Day is on the 10th October.
- ITV, the Chartered College of Teaching and other mental health charities have launched a homework task to try get pupils talking to their families about their feelings as part of ITV’s latest ‘Britain Get Talking’ campaign.
- ITV’s Good Morning Britain conducted a OnePoll survey of 1,000 parents of 9–15-year-olds, which showed that 74% are more likely to talk to their children about child-focused topics like homework, than about bigger issues like war and conflict (17%) or money issues (22%).
- This initiative notes that doing homework may be one of the few times during the week that a young person will ask for help.
- This homework exercise asks teachers and schools to send children home with the task of asking a trusted adult for a conversation about their worries.
- The hope is that over time this could make a difference in talking about subjects that are hard to face.
- For more, please visit the TES website.
OpenAI gives ChatGPT a voice for verbal conversations
- OpenAI has announced that it is adding new voice and image-based capabilities to ChatGPT.
- A user will now be able to verbally ask ChatGPT to complete a task, only requiring a few vocal prompts to guide the narrative or simply asking it a question.
- ChatGPT will give its response in spoken word form.
- The new voice feature is powered by a new text-to-speech model that can generate human-like voices from text and a snippet of sampled speech.
- These new features will roll out to paying ‘Plus’ and ‘Enterprise’ subscribers in the next two weeks.
- Voice will be limited to the ChatGPT Android and iOS apps initially on an opt-in beta basis and image search will be arriving on all platforms by default.
- For more, please visit the Tech Crunch website.
The following stories may be regionalised:
Welsh translation of NSPCC book aims to teach children how to stay safe
- The NSPCC children’s book, ‘Pantosaurus and the Power of PANTS’, is being made available in Welsh in every primary school, nursery and library in Wales.
- The original book, is based on the charity’s Talk PANTS campaign, which features Pantosaurus, the NSPCC’s friendly dinosaur who teaches parents and children about how to stay safe.
- Talk PANTS aims to help children recognise what abuse is and how to speak up if they are made to feel uncomfortable.
- It provides advice to parents and carers of children aged three to eight years-old on how to talk to children about sexual abuse in an age-appropriate manner.
- For more, please visit the Nation Cymru News website.
Unions demand extra funding for school rebuilding
- Trade unions have urged Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to commit to allocating an extra £4 billion to upgrade school buildings.
- This comes as the Department for education continues to struggle with crumbling Raac concrete.
- In a letter to the Prime Minister, eight trade unions and the body representing school governors warned of “serious concerns” about the state of school buildings in England.
- Within this letter they appealed for more funding to be allocated in the autumn statement in November to “ensure this crisis never happens again and show the Government is prepared to spend whatever it takes to keep children safe in education”.
- For more, please visit the Yahoo News website.
