New software has been created to determine the facial expressions of students. It uses technology to give data as to what emotions someone is feeling such as happiness, sadness, and boredom. These technologies are possibly going to be used in classrooms to help students learn better based on their emotions towards the lesson that they are learning. However, the use of software to determine the emotional expressions of students in the classroom is not valuable to the students learning experience.

To start, in order for this new technology to work, students woukld have to constantly be watched by cameras that read their expressions. This is said in the text when it says, "Using imagery, the new emotion-recognition software tracks these facial movements," (D'Alto 4). One can see from this that the students would always have to be watched and their facial movements would all be recorded. This could be an issue of privacy for some students if they do not want to constantly be recorded. It also makes it easy for outside threats to hack this system and watch students or get personal information from the videos. Emotion-recognition software can also be expensive for schools, especially since it doesnt work on normal PC computers. The text states, " Your home PC can't handle the complex algorithms used to decode Mona Lisa's smile," (D'Alto 7). This shows that normal computers that students would typically use cannot support this technology, making the school buy the technology that can support it. This would be a costly job and if the school cannot pay for it then the students would have to and some families may not be able to afford it. Lastly, students facial expressions may not directly correlate with the emotion they are feeling towards the lesson that they are learning. This can be seen in the text when it says, " A classroom computer could recognize when a stuent is becoming confused or bored," Dr Huang predicts. "Then it could modify the lesson, like an effective human instructor,"" (D'Alto 6). This exemplifies that the schools want to use this technology to help students learn more effectively by using technology thats like a teacher. For some students this may cause trouble if they make facial expressions, but it's not about the lesson. Such as if a student is told something by another student and the student looks confused, the computer might see that and think they dont understand the lesson. Then it would modify the lesson for the student even if the student understood it just fine. A teacher would be much better at understanding the students emotions in a certain situation than technology.

Students need to be able to learn on their own and to communicate with teachers on how well they´re understanding what they´re learning. By using facial recognition technology, its taking away their communication skills. There are many flaws to the facial-expression technology that make it a bad candidate to use in schools. It´s certain that there are plenty of good uses for facial expression technology, however using it in schools is not one of them.          