Today marks our second major upgrade release of the year, and we are excited to be rolling out four major features that we’ve been cooking up for quite some time.

First, we now offer the ability to design and publish what we’re calling Extras! When used in combination with role-based classes, Extras will serve as a powerful tool for schools providing resources related to libraries, media & technology, sports, clubs, and even professional development for teachers. (See how!) Extras help to keep your Haiku portal organized via a new global filter that separates traditional academic classes from Extras.

We also rolled out Gradebook Sorting.  Teachers now have powerful sorting options directly in the Haiku Gradebook which allow you to control the order in which assignments appear. (See how!)  It’s perfect for when your class doesn’t necessarily run in chronological order.  We think anyone running self-paced classes (especially at virtual and cyber schools) will absolutely love this.

We’ve also enabled Restricted Access Assessments & Restricted Access Results.  Haiku now contains a suite of new features to help teachers better manage assessments in a proctored or lab environment.  With a Restricted Access Assessment, students can only access the exam with a password provided by the proctor.  Similarly, teachers can now post exam results with the added security of an exam-specific password. (See how!)

Finally, for our domain administrators, we’ve added a small (but mighty) feature to manually create School Years in Haiku.  This is the perfect solution for when teachers are working ahead to plan for next year before your SIS system is ready to go there! (See how!)

2012 is well underway, and so are updates to Haiku LMS! This time around we have a little something that saves everyone precious time. Take a look!

Haiku Mobile. You can read so much of your Haiku LMS content on an iPad. And this just in: Now you can see grades, too! Up next: Teachers will be able to enter grades!

Discussions. Keeping it simple(r). As a teacher, you click on a Discussion topic and what do you see? Student posts, right? Well, if you want to see all the posts by one particular student, you have a new option in the “More” menu: “View This Student’s Posts.” And if you want to enter a grade at that point go right ahead: A new entry field awaits you!

(Major) Assessment Improvements. Once upon a time your network and Haiku Assessments may have miscommunicated. That is, a slow network could cause Assessments to lag. Though a rare occurrence, this simply cannot be! So it no longer is. We added a number of failsafes to ensure that your data remains intact and your Assessments keep up-to-speed.

We made many minor fixes and other enhancements, too, and we’ll have another round of updates launching yet in January. Trust us: You’re gonna love them!