This site is rarely updated. benbrophy.com is more up-to-date. - Ben
Sakai Notepad
There are some tools in Sakai that can work as stand alone tools, but are in many ways a service available to any other tools. The gradebook, for example, works by itself, you can add new assignments and enter grades for them, but it really comes alive when used with other tools like Exams & Quizzes. A student taking a quiz gets a score that is sent to the gradebook to be stored and used for calculating the course grade.
Other tools work this way. Dates could be scored from any tool to the Schedule, materials from Resources should be available to attach to any announcement, discussion post, homework assignment, etc. Yesterday we scoped the sectioning tool and agreed that a list of sections should be available to any tool that might use them. In the Announcement tool it might be possible to only share the announcement with sections meeting on Thursday for example.
Well I thought of possible tool that would work mainly as a service to other tools early this morning. This year is the 25th anniversary of the post-it note. The post it note's real potential showed when the engineer working on it decided to take one and stick it on some one elses report, write a question on it, and return to the author. The note was attached to the report, but also seperable.
In teaching, instructors often leave notes for students. My teachers have often left notes jotted on top of papers, for example, which in big class might be the most meaningful contact I have with the teacher. Instructors also take take notes about students that aren't shared - in the gradebook we'd like include a way for TAs to leave a note explaining their rational for changing a grade. There are shared notes describing the value of reading (the description field of a resource), or a private notes about how well questions on an assessment worked. Maybe it would be interesting for a CMS to keep track of all these notes.
A notepad tool could be used on it's own, a place to jot notes about the course. But it's real power would be to collect an organize all the notes taken about students and materials and the course in one place, where they could be viewable by date or by topic, where they are indexed and searchable. You'd have a log of the course with little to no additional effort form the instructors.