Rethinking Note-Taking, Student Voice, and Human Connection in Hybrid Schools
This month we had the joy of connecting with Lara Price an experienced school librarian, housemistress, and educator who has spent 25 years navigating the shifting landscapes of boarding, curriculum, and student wellbeing.
Lara describes herself as a “project person”—someone who thrives on setting things up, solving puzzles, and moving on to the next challenge. That spirit resonates deeply with our work across the Novus Learning Network (NLN), where schools, consultants, and innovators are collectively building new forms of learning in the cloud.
📓 Creative Note-Taking and the Future of Revision
Lara shared a simple but radical question: What if note-taking was redesigned for how children actually learn today?
She imagines a digital “one-screen” workspace combining mind-mapping, Cornell notes, doodles, revision prompts, and citations—all visible, layered, and owned by the learner.
This vision echoes experiments from the 1950s, where state schools trialled blank + lined notebooks to activate both sides of the brain. Contrast that with today’s schools, where doodling is often punished—even though it helps many learners listen and regulate.
At The Haven, we’ve seen platforms like Pencil Spaces and Canvas begin to model this: infinite whiteboards, collaborative rooms, and course-aligned templates. But Lara’s provocation reminds us we’re still only partway there.
Invitation: What tools are you using to support visual, embodied, or creative note-taking? Could we, as a network, prototype something new together? Please share the collaborative apps you love using at home, school or work in the comments.
🗣 Student Voice, Done Properly
Lara is also a fierce advocate for student voice. She has lived the circle model:
Ideas begin with tutor groups.
Representatives meet in student councils.
Proposals go to SLT.
Most importantly—the circle closes, with transparent feedback looping back to learners.
Too often that last step is skipped, undermining trust. Lara’s challenge: if we’re serious about autonomy in online and hybrid schools, we must design structures where student ownership is real—not tokenistic.
🤝 Human Connection in Digital Spaces
Beyond tools and councils, Lara reminded us of something essential:
“I am more into the virtual coffee side than the work side. I love talking about education, passing on knowledge, and sharing ideas. That’s the stage I am in.”
At the NLN, this ethos matters. Our network is not just about systems or compliance—it’s about keeping human connection at the heart of digital schooling. Whether over a whiteboard or a coffee, learning happens in the relational space.
✦ Join the Conversation
The Novus Learning Network is a collaborative of schools, consultants, and innovators working at the edges of online, hybrid, and decentralised learning.
We’re currently exploring:
Prototyping creative note-taking apps with AI and symbolic design.
Embedding genuine student voice into online schools.
Sharing lived expertise across boarding, SEND, neurodivergent education, and curriculum design.
Experimenting with small, focused GPTs (smGPTs) for teachers and families—like Aaron H’s Conceptual Thinking GPT for K–5, which generates lesson ideas from just three short questions. This has sparked rich debate within the NLN: should educator tools frontload with many prompts, or stay lightweight to respect teacher time and compute resources?
👉 If you’d like to join, share ideas, or simply have a virtual coffee with us, get in touch. Together we’re building schools in the cloud—human, future-proof, and alive with possibility.
#BuildingSchoolsInTheCloud #Verseality #HybridLearning #StudentVoice #AIinEducation #FutureOfLearning #Neurodiversity #EducationalInnovation
First published in Building Schools in the Cloud on LinkedIn, 23 September 2025.