Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Step-By-Step Example: Mashedge For Teachers

Are you a teacher who uses the internet a lot to find information? Then Mashedge can help you be more productive.

Let's say you want to find information on the internet about the "Famous Inventions made by Kids". Normally, you would use a search engine to do your research and save the information somewhere on your computer.

Here's how to use Mashedge to do the same thing and yet be more productive.

  1. Create a web book titled 'Famous Inventions by Kids'
  2. Make the book "private" while you build the book. (This is the default option).
  3. Add chapter 1 title: Invention by under 10 years old.
  4. Add chapter 2 title: Invention by under 15 years old.
  5. Add chapter 3 title: Inventions by Kids in India
  6. Add chapter 4 title: Inventions by Kids in America
  7. And so on. Add how many ever chapters you want.
  8. Click on "Create" and the outline of the book is created for you. The table of contents is now displayed for you.
  9. Click on any chapter for which you want to add content. Now search the internet. When you find relevant content, cut and paste the URL of the website and click on "Add Web Page Link". That link now appears in the recommended content. Slowly as you add links, the book becomes better and better over time. Since you anyway search the web, the only additional step for the teacher is to cut and paste the link into the web book.
Now, to unleash the real power of Mashedge, a set of teachers can collaborate to build the web book. To enable this, click on the link "Manage Private Book Users" from the main page of the web book. You can now enter the email addresses of the teachers with whom you want to collaborate. When you do this, the other teacher gets instant access to the web book and can also add content that she discovers into the same book! Now you have multiple people working to build the book, each can see the content that the other person is adding, and can avoid duplicate work.

Once the book is built, you can grant read-only permissions to your students to browse through the book and allow them to see the websites you discover. If you want to share the book with the world, you can make the book "public" at that point in time.

And this is not all. Come next year, the teacher in charge of the subject can update the book. She does not have to start from scratch once again. She can simply update the books with new links and make the book current!

Mashedge allows teachers to provide better personalized learning experience to the students with very little additional work. At the same time, it allows the teacher to be more productive by collaborating with other teachers. It's a win-win for all - the teachers, students, and the school.

Step-By-Step Example: Mashedge for project teams

Here's an example on how a project team can use the Shared Private Web Book feature to improve team productivity.

Let's say the group project for an MBA team is to build the marketing strategy for a new product. Here's how Mashedge can help them in the information gathering phase of the project:

  • Group leader creates a private web book on Mashedge, and gives permission to each member of the group to access the private web book.
  • When each member of the group logs in, they can see the private web book in their "My Favorites" automatically,
  • Group leader creates chapters on various aspects of market research such as competitor info, market segmentation, pricing, advertising strategies, ad agencies etc. More chapters can be added as and when needed by any member of the group.
  • Each group member takes charge on one or two chapters and agrees to add links to the chapter when new information is found on the internet. This helps the member keep track of all the information in one place.
  • With this setup, all members of the group have instant access to all the information found on the internet by the entire team. The team does not do duplicate research and is more productive.
Once the team has completed its information gathering phase by using Mashedge, it can then use a document editor that supports collaboration (such as Google docs) to write the actual document.

Sunday, March 29, 2009

New Feature: Sharing Private Web Books

We have put in a new feature that enables private web books to be shared with specific people. This feature is very useful for companies, professionals, and teams of people.

Companies can create private web books for their use internally as a learning tool to improve productivity. It also enables professionals such as financial consultants, recruiters etc to share huge amounts of information with their clients in a simple and efficient manner via Mashedge web books.

Even individuals can use this feature to do group projects. This feature will enable people in a group to divide up their online research work and at the same time, be aware of what the other group members are doing.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

New Feature: Private Books

We have released a new feature on Mashedge that would allow users to create private web books. This would be perfect for those users who are creating web books but the web book is not ready for release to the general public. This will provide authors with a quiet place to build a quality web book.

You can enable this as follows: At the time you create a web book, you can check the option for "Private?". If checked, the web book would be accessible only to the author.

You can always change the book permissions at a future date by using the "Manage the Book" panel of the web book.

Web Book on Building a Website with Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails is quite popular for building web sites. I have built many enterprise quality servers in C, C++, Perl, and now Ruby on Rails. I can say with great confidence that Ruby on Rails is really a great choice for building server side applications. I have captured my learning on building a website with Ruby on Rails in this Mashedge Web Book titled Building a Website using Ruby on Rails. Check it out.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Users with old IE browsers

Users who are using older versions of Internet Explorer (versions 6, 5 ) may have some trouble viewing the website properly. We have put in some fixes to minimize the problem. We suggest that users upgrade to the IE version 7 or version 8. You can also use the latest and truly excellent Firefox or Safari web browsers. These latest web browsers are fast and offer far greater security features.

Sunday, March 22, 2009

Beta Site Launched

We are pleased to launch the beta version of Mashedge.

Mashedge allows users to string together the gems of knowledge on the internet into viable web books.

Even though the search technology has advanced so much, people who are not tech savvy still find the internet intimidating. They type in a few keywords and they are shown large number of results. Children tend to get lost in the clutter of the internet. Busy professionals have no time to dig through the search results. Even internet savvy people can find the amount of information overwhelming.

Now, just imagine if you could browse the web like a book. Simply define the contents of the web book and let users add links to the websites they think is the best. The end result: you can get large amounts of information with one click in the familiar format of a book.

Mashedge offers this technology. We have a few featured books that highlight its potential:

  1. Singapore Math Curriculum: (Online Learning) Now use the Singapore math curriculum as the basis for browsing math websites. This will help students not get lost in the clutter of the internet.
  2. The financial crisis of 2008: (Current Events) Get a comprehensive picture about the financial crisis we all hate.
  3. Amazon Kindle: (Product Information) Know more about the Kindle before you buy. Find out the after sales issues experienced by other people.
  4. Barack Obama: (Politics) Get a comprehensive view of the new US president Barack Obama. Do you know where to find the his campaign promises? Well, now you can.
The possibilities are limitless. You can pretty much create a web book on any topic.

So, come on over, sign up and start contributing to Mashedge.