Odense high school brings back handwritten notes

Mulernes Legatskole in Odense has reduced screen use and brought back handwritten note-taking for new students, DR reports.

The high school has bought notebooks for all new first-year students and small whiteboards for every student. They will use them to take notes by hand and answer questions during lessons, with the aim of creating greater calm and engagement in the classroom.

“There is a different sense of calm when you sit and write by hand,” headteacher Henrik Vestergaard Stokholm said.

Although computers can also be useful tools, Stokholm believes pen and paper benefit both teaching and students.

“I hope the students realise that they do not learn anything by sitting with their phones and computers all the time. They need to relearn how to take notes by hand. They will also need that when they continue in the education system,” he said.

More schools putting screens away

Mulernes Legatskole is not the only school bringing back notebooks and other analogue tools, according to Dorte Ågård, an educational consultant and author of the book “Screens in school”.

“All these so-called old-fashioned things are being brought out again, to the great pleasure and benefit of the students who use them,” she said.

For the past 15 years, the prevailing idea has been that more information technology and more screens in teaching were better. That view is now changing, Ågård said.

“We know from very robust research that you remember what you write by hand better than what you type on a keyboard, and even more so than something written by someone else that you simply read,” she said.