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Those studies about the wonders of handwriting all suffer from the same set of flaws, namely, a) that they don’t actually work with students who have been taught to use their laptops or devices for taking notes. That is, they all hand students devices and tell them to take notes in the same way they would in written form. In some cases those devices don’t have keyboards; in some cases they don’t provide software tools to use (there are some great ones, but doing it in say, Word, isn’t going to maximize the options digital spaces allow), in some cases the devices are not ones the students use themselves and with which they are comfortable. And b) the studies are almost always focused on learning in large lecture classes or classes in which the assessment of success is performance on a standardized (typically multiple-choice) test, not in the ways that many, many classes operate, and not a measure that many of us use in our own classes. And c) they don’t actually attempt to integrate the devices into the classes in question,

I have plenty of conversations with students about how to take notes already. Most of the time their problem isn’t which device (pencil, laptop, phone, quill) they use to take those notes, but how to take them and how to use them to learn based on their own experiences, learning styles, and discipline

we found that whiteboard animations have a positive effect on retention, engagement and enjoyment, although we do not rule out the possibility that some of this result is due to novelty

While animations have a long history in the realm of education, and there is a plethora of research on instructional animations, attempts to measure their impact on educational outcomes have been inconclusive and often contradictory (Betrancourt, 2005)

For practical applications, however, the relevant question is not whether animations affect learning, but rather when and how animation affects learning ( Höffler & Leutner, 2007; Mayer & Moreno, 2002)