Looseleaf

The Problem

Shared digital notebooks promise a lot and deliver setup cost — accounts to provision, apps to install, materials to rebuild. And the tools that do handle assessment tend to solve integrity by surveilling students and handing teachers a suspicion score they didn't ask for and can't verify.

The Approach

• Built the class as a live shared canvas over Cloudflare Durable Objects — one room per page, WebSocket-backed — so student work streams to the teacher continuously instead of being collected at the end. Started on an off-the-shelf canvas SDK, then replaced it with a custom ink engine when the licensing and latency math stopped working.
• Teachers hand out a page from a content library and get per-student delivery receipts — you know who actually received it, not just who you sent it to.
• A 25-up class grid shows every student's canvas updating live, so a teacher can see the room at a glance.
• Teacher ink appears on a student's screen as it's being written, which makes feedback a conversation during the work rather than a verdict after it.
• Focus sessions log integrity events — tab hidden, fullscreen exited — as timestamped facts over the class bus. The product never interprets, scores, or accuses: a documented non-negotiable, because on iPad these are best-effort signals, not proof, and a tool that pretends otherwise gets students in trouble for nothing.
• Students join with a code — no account, nothing to install.

The Outcome