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What it does

Using the Materials tool, you can share many kinds of material securely with members of your site, or make them available to the public. You also have your own private Materials area in your My Workspace.

You can upload files (e.g., word processing documents, spreadsheets, slide presentations, and videos), as well as create and post HTML (web) pages and simple text documents, and share links to useful web sites.

You can organize your Materials items into folders, and you can control which groups or types of users can access and add to different folders.

Also, you can show or hide an item at any time, and set a start and/or end time for its availability.

Key concepts

Viewing items: When you click Materials in a site's menubar, you will see a list of that site's Materials items. Click the title of an item to open it.

To view the contents of a folder, click the folder's name to enter it, or click the folder icon to expand its contents in the list. To expand or collapse all folders, at the top, next to "Title", click the black double arrow.

You can sort items by title, size, resource creator, and last modified date. Site leaders can customize the order in which items appear.

Adding items: To add an item, mouse over the Add link corresponding to the folder where you want to store the item. Then, choose the type of item to add from the subsequent drop-down list.

Organizing items: Site leaders can organize items into folders and subfolders, and customize the order in which items appear. To reorder items, mouse over Actions and select Reorder.

Sharing materials Each item is available via a URL, which you can share with site participants.

Drag and drop: You can drag and drop files to and from your desktop using WebDAV.

Group spaces: You can share items with pre-defined groups, which gives you more control over who has access to Materials items.

Controlling access: Using the Permissions feature, site owners can control which types of users can read, post, revise, and/or delete files in specific folders. Site owners and instructors can make a resource available to anyone by choosing to post it with the "public view" setting checked.

Things to consider

• Many classes post weekly readings in their Materials. These can include links to websites as well as to other kinds of documents, like Adobe PDF files. Some classes also post presentations or slides used in lectures.
• By setting folder Permissions, a large collaboration site can use one folder in Materials as a space to archive important documents, and allow only certain site participants to modify those documents.