Sakai Big Idea #5: Group-aware Tools

This is the last in our five-part series called, “Sakai 5 Big Ideas.”

Group-aware tools can be a new concept for many of us — one that is very powerful!

Group-aware tools allow an Instructor (or site Organizer) to streamline communications with multiple groups of people within a single site. Furthermore, those groups can have their own sets of private collaboration tools to self-organize as they wish!

There are two key points to keep in mind:

1. Groups can refer to Sections (course sections automatically created from the Registrar/Student Information System) or groups that you create manually.
2. Your site has to be populated with people before you can manually create groups and “release” tools to them.

This 4-minute video should help explain…

The list of group-aware tools in our Sakai 2.6 environment includes:

• Announcements
• Assignments
• Calendar
• Discussions & Private Messages
• Forums
• Gradebook
• Messages
• Resources
• Roster
• Site Statistics
• Tests & Quizzes