Most teachers spend their days trying to do two things: help students focus and figure out how they're feeling. 

This week's Tech Tool find tackles the first problem with a surprisingly simple timer; while this week's Brainy Bit research find explores AI that may someday tackle the second. 

Whether that's exciting or terrifying probably depends on who you ask. But either way, you're about to become an even better teacher in the next 4 minutes.

🔉But first, this week's sponsor is for teachers wondering if AI can do more than write lesson plans.

200 Ways To Make Money With AI

Turns out, AI is good for more than writing emails and generating LinkedIn posts. This guide is packed with 200+ actionable ways to build income with AI.

Inside you'll discover:

• 200 curated AI income ideas for beginners and pros alike

• Easy-to-start opportunities you can launch this week

• Real world applications for today’s top AI tools

• AI powered business models built for today’s economy

• Creative ways to turn trends into revenue

AI is changing how people work and how people earn, far beyond the simple “write me an email” prompt. Discover the possibilities and download the free guide to start cashing in today.

Get The Free Guide

And now, back to making you an even better teacher. ⬇️ 

BRAINY BIT

AI That Reads Your Students' Faces

The conversation around AI in the classroom usually centers around curriculum and learning. But what about its impact on the social-emotional part of the classroom? Especially for those teaching in virtual environments, where detecting a student’s emotions become a lot harder.

TLDR: Researchers built an AI model trained on over 35,000 facial images that detects 7 student emotions in real time (reaching 95% accuracy) and the implications for how we think about emotional awareness, personalized learning, and surveillance in K-12 are impossible to ignore.

The Study: Emotional recognition with AI

Unlike a typical classroom study with real students, this was a technical model-building paper. Researchers trained a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) (a type of AI that learns to recognize visual patterns) on a dataset that was made up of 35,887 labeled grayscale facial images categorized into 7 emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, and neutral. Images spanned different ages, genders, and ethnicities.

The dataset was split 80/20 — 80% to train the model, 20% held back to test it on faces it had never seen. 

The model ran through 50 learning cycles, with built-in safeguards to prevent it from simply memorizing the training data. Performance was measured on accuracy, precision, and recall across all 7 emotion categories.

The Results:

The model hit 95% overall accuracy on unseen data, with precision above 94% for most emotion categories. 

Happiness and surprise were detected most reliably. The researchers specifically designed this for real-time use in educational settings, including online classrooms where the traditional cues us teachers rely on simply aren't available.

The researchers were also candid about what this technology doesn't solve yet: emotional expressions vary significantly across cultures, the dataset doesn't fully represent global diversity, and the ethical concerns are substantial. 

Collecting students' facial and emotional data without informed consent raises serious questions about privacy, bias, and who ultimately controls that information.

In YOUR Classroom:

As AI tools inch closer to real classroom deployment, this study is a timely signal that us teachers need to be part of the conversation about what emotional monitoring looks like, who it's designed to serve, and what guardrails actually protect students.

Here’s how these results can impact your classroom approach this week:

Strategies That Work:

1. Make it a lesson. AI emotion detection is a compelling entry point for media literacy, digital citizenship, and ethics discussions; students have opinions about being watched, and those opinions are worth developing critically.

2. Use it as a mirror. Before any technology tries to read the room, ask yourself: how well do I read my own students' emotional states, and where are my blind spots? This study is a good prompt for honest self-reflection.

3. Advocate before it arrives. Any AI monitoring tool pitched to your school should come with teacher input baked in — not as an afterthought. Your voice in that conversation matters more than any algorithm's.

AI that reads faces is already here. The question now is whether the adults in the room are ready to decide how, when, and whether it belongs in our classrooms at all.

🚀 Noteworthy News

TECH TOOL

The Calmest Tab You'll Open

By June, many of us aren't chasing perfect lessons anymore. We're chasing calm. If students are reading, working, and mostly staying upright in a room with questionable air conditioning, that's a win.

The Solution: Glow Clock

Glow Clock is exactly what it sounds like: a beautiful browser-based clock paired with simple timers. No accounts. No setup. No fifty-button dashboard begging for attention.

The timer works especially well with the Pomodoro Technique, a focus method that alternates work sessions (often 25 minutes) with short breaks. Here, though, it feels less like productivity culture and more like permission: focus on one thing for the next little while, then rest.

Is This For YOUR Classroom?

If you're looking for a lesson builder, this isn't it. Glow Clock does one job and does it well. Teachers who appreciate calm routines, quiet reading blocks, or independent work time will likely get the most value from it.

Strategies That Work:

1. Quiet Reading Companion: Project the clock during sustained silent reading to help keep kids on track.

2. Gentle Pomodoro Sessions: Use work-and-break cycles without adding pressure, turning independent work into sectioned goals instead of scary tasks.

3. Independent Work Anchor: Give students a visual sense of time passing for the time in the year when time seems to move too slow.

Sometimes the best classroom tool adds nothing new.

Just a little more calm.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

We would LOVE to hear from you!

Reply to this email, or send us a message on Instagram! We’re here to walk with you in these crazy times!

Part of what makes The PEN Weekly community so special is the fact that our readers are teachers from around the world! We’re not going to lie, we think that’s pretty darn cool!

We’ll see you again on Monday 🍎

Share this newsletter!

Do you know someone who would appreciate reading the PEN? Share this newsletter with them! Our goal is to reach as many teachers as possible, and to build a community of teachers supporting teachers.