In "Making Mona Lisa Smile" the author describes a computer program called the Facial Action Coding System and gives, among other things, reasons why it could be useful in a classroom as a tool. The author states that the computer could be used to, ". . .modify the lesson, like an effective human instructor." when a student gets bored or confused. I believe that it could be useful in student studies. However as we do not yet have fully automated school lessons, the Facial Action Coding System would be unused in most cases.

The information from this new coming technology is used to impersonate a human counterpart, therefore the information would be already in use by the human teacher already in a classroom. The computer does what teachers all over already do everyday and every class period. The expressions from students is already being used by the teacher to change lessons when they become noneffective. With teachers already doing that the information becomes useless for the teacher already has the skills to do so themselves.

The artical states that, "Your home PC can't handle the complex algorithms used to decode Mona Lisa's smile." If Huang, creator of the computer program, could creat a more home friendly version of the softwear it could improve the uses of such technology. For students who use an online school, this information could be much more useful. Online schools do not have the face to face connection that brick and mortar schools do, therefore the computer lessons could use the facial expressions to drasticly improve their lesson plans. They could scan the face of the student and see to what type of lessons the student responds better to and use that type of teaching more often.

In conclusion, in my opinion, the use of this technology to read the emotional expressions of students in a classroom is of limited value. With the use of human teachers the information given from the Facial Action Coding System is redundent. The softwear has many uses in marketing and online schooling, but the technology is of little value when the teacher is capable of reading the same emotions and putting them to the same use. The Facial Action Coding System has many places it would be valuable in, the classroom is not one of them.