Having flexible authentication which allows me to really control my site participants is excellent. I already use this heavily and I use the UMichigan friend accounts integrated into CTools/Sakai a lot.

I have been teaching for almost a week now – this is how I am using Sakai/CTools.
Assignments – this tool is awesome – it fits my workflow for assignments nicely without too many features. I like the following features: (a) The dates to show, open, and close the assignment, (b) the attachment functionality and the fact that files are *not* viewable in the Resources tool, (c) the ability to add an announcement and calendar entry automatically, (d) the ability to get mail as students submit and the ability to get mail only once per day if I want, (e) the richness and flexibility of the grading workflow – I like to grade as the assignments come in – sometimes if we are doing an assignment in a lab I grade the moment the assignments come in.
The only think I would is to add a “show me the assignments that have been handed in but not yet graded” – effectively a “to do” view – I grade quickly and continuously. As I make my way through the grading – it gets hard to find the students who have submitted but I have not graded yet ungraded submissions. The sort on graded/ungraded and the sort on submission date are *close* but not perfect. I would hate to have 400 students in a course and try to hunt through to find the ungraded submissions. This is a very small shortcoming in an overall very nice tool.
Chat – I initially thought this was pointless for the purposes of me interacting with the students – but the students love it to interact with each other during lecture – the help each other out and probably say things like “this prof sucks” :) I am not sure I will find an important use for myself.
Wiki – I made it student-writable – I am trying to get the students to become a “Village” helping each other out and the Wiki would be perfect for this – but frankly Wiki syntax is a non starter for casual use. HTML would be better :( We will see how it goes. For me, to author, I think I will just use Word and PDF. Maybe in time I will learn to like the Wiki.
Syllabus – I found this useless I did not want to paste everything into a bunch of little fields – I just did a word document and put it up under resources. Even the redirect feature failed because I had a PDF – a Web Content tool pointing at the PDF named “Sylllabus” would have been better. Ultimately I put it under Resource and used notification to send out a note.
Resources – Wow – I love the 2.4 resources tool – Harriet, Jim and the other folks that worked on this – it is awesome. Common tasks are done quickly and naturally with little clicking or scrolling – the screens are simple and uncluttered and well suited to the common tasks. The Resource helper is also nice – until I started using it, it felt a bit unwieldy – but the common attachments task workflow moves quickly with all the focus near the top of the screen.
The lack of the page-order tool in the UM CTools installation is still very frustrating – this is a wonderful tool. My left hand side is already getting kind of ugly looking with things just jumbled together in the default order – I really would like to put the most important tool at the top and change names of things to try to give the students an understanding of what is important and what I put there for their benefit. Any one who says that tool order needs to be controlled by thin institution to make tech support easier – Grrrrrr. I cannot imagine that is statement is *ever* true – and not letting me change page order really cramps my style.