Blackboard Survival Tip #1a

Since I mentioned it yesterday, Liz Evans passed along a handy little utility for Mac OS X users who want to package zip archive content for use on Blackboard with the Document Unpackager building block. If you use the built-in zip facility in OS X, you'll get lots of invisible files (made visible) in your Blackboard course. To avoid a lot of manual cleanup, you should use a handy scripted droplet to make an archive file that has this invisible content stripped out. (You can do this other ways, but this is really easy for the Mac users.) Please see yesterday's post about the Document Unpackager building block if you don't know what I'm talking about.

Download the droplet for Mac OS X.
You can also retrieve a page of documentation prepared by Liz.

In short:
1) Name and organize your folder tree to match your desired hierarchy for content on Blackboard.
2) Drag-n-drop the folder onto the Packager script to make the "clean" zip file.
3) Load the content into a content area in Blackboard using the "Document Package" content type from the "Select" pull-down menu.