A study published in Psychological Science shows that students retained more information when taking handwritten rather than computer-typed notes. Students who used laptops had worse retention than the scribblers after a week even when allowed to review the notes prior to being tested on the content.

Lucky then that there is a Digital Writing Revolution under way which allows users the option to write longhand using special pens or writing tablets and save the results on the computer.

Another hybrid method is handwriting notes in an ‘ultimate’ notebook using the Cornell Method then scanning them for long term storage and research on the computer.

Yet another manual method for getting the info into your head is Sketchnotes , where a combination of pictures and arrows work along with the written text to anchor the stuff in your grey matter. Once complete, these too are scanned into the computer for later review and storage.

Update: Another cool sketcher showing how to use it for school notes.