Spring is in the air here at onestopenglish HQ, so throughout April we're running a special discount offer on all individual subscriptions to the onestopenglish Staff Room. Subscribe today and get 20% off your subscription.

We've just returned from the IATEFL Conference and Exhibition which was held in the beautiful city of Cardiff this year. Our editor-at-large, Karen Richardson, was let loose on the unsuspecting conference attendees to get the low-down on the themes and highlights of this year's big event.

And check out our brand-new dictionary widget (over there on the right, underneath the Quick search). You can now search the Macmillan Dictionary Online straight from any page on onestopenglish!

As Alex Case points out in TEFL links of the month March 2009, onestopblogs is in fact brand new and does have aspirations to become the 'most comprehensive TEFL blog aggregator'. Thanks for the mention Alex!

Onestopblogs is a work in progress but is live and you can visit it at blogs.onestopenglish.com. It is a blog aggregator - which means that it pulls in feeds from any blog listed on the site. It does plenty of other things too, as long as it has plenty of content to play with. For example, if it spots the same terms and tags and keywords in several blog titles, it will aggregate them in the Top Stories section, meaning that readers can find out which common threads are getting teachers talking!

We started with 47 blogs, choosing blogs we read regularly and researching new ones. Our aim is to continue to add blogs over the coming weeks. If anyone objects to having their blog listed, we will of course take it down immediately. This is a service which we hope will complement onestopenglish and which should help bloggers to increase traffic to their blogs and reach the wider TEFL community.

We've tried to aggregate blogs on a wide variety of topics and have created categories which you can filter the whole site by. There are technology blogs, ESL-specific blogs, linguistics blogs and even one ELT management blog. The idea is to make onestopblogs the portal for English teachers to read about issues in ELT.

Today we've done another round of testing and fixing but we really need the help of the TEFL community to evaluate the site, spot bugs, make suggestions and, of course, send us their blogs! Get in touch with the onestopenglish team by emailing us at webeditor@macmillan.com.

Please join us by sending your blogs to the onestopenglish team!

Did you know that there are over 250 interactive games and activities on onestopenglish? We're celebrating this with a prize draw for new and existing subscribers - there are 10 Language Games CD-ROMs up for grabs.

Our March edition is full of fun resources: Paul Ashe takes a look at limericks in this entertaining speaking skills lesson and, for younger learners, there's a Selections story about fashion.

On a more serious note, we'd like you to join the debate on Content Language Integrated Learning. This time, we're talking about the effect CLIL can have on English language learning. Read all about it on our 2009 CLIL Debate page.

Love is in the air on onestopenglish this month, so we think you should enjoy the cute little cupid in this St Valentine's video.

We've got two pin-ups for you this month: Shah Rukh Khan, the king of Bollywood; and our very own Jamie Keddie, February's Author of the Month.

Not that Little Milly-Molly, star of this month's poem for young learners, will be interested: she likes toys but she definitely doesn't like boys! Read the lesson plan to find out more.

Finally, don't miss our series of Nursing-English worksheets and podcasts. Part three is all about diet and obesity and is available at intermediate and advanced levels.

What's new on onestopenglish?      

 
Happy New Year! January is Young Learner month and we have some fantastic new content to share with you. To start with, we're launching a brand-new section, featuring original stories and poems from the Selections story anthology series for children, complete with new activities and worksheets.

We also have another great Spot on news lesson on the topic of dinosaurs and an arts and crafts lesson about monsters, perfect for engaging your class of Young Learners. And author of Onestop Phonics, Rachel Finnie, talks to us about her life and work in this exclusive interview.

With all 26 Phonics characters now available on onestopenglish, we'd like to know which fun and fruity personality you like the most. Vote for your favourite Phonics character in our poll!

There's lots more great content - take your time to explore and enjoy another packed edition of onestopenglish!

What's new on onestopenglish?        

'Tis the season to be jolly, and we certainly have a jolly good collection of new materials this month! We're spreading the festive joy with an integrated skills lesson on Obama's victory speech and a superb seasonal selection of games and activities.

You'll go crackers over our bumper end-of-year edition, which includes the fantastic final instalment of Jackie McAvoy's video projects, and our Author of the month, Russell Whitehead, wraps up his excellent series of TKT practice materials with another great lesson.

But, fear not! The onestopenglish elves have been busy working on lots of new ideas for the New Year ahead … and we simply can't wait to share them with you!

With our heads still buzzing from the launch of The Road Less Travelled, Lesley Duffin, from Solihull College's ESOL School, tells us how the onestopenglish podcasts have played a key part in developing her students' listening skills.

October sees the launch of Spot on news lessons for teens! Based on articles from Spot on magazine, this series includes worksheets and activities written by our Author of the month, Karen Richardson.

We know you've been on tenterhooks waiting to find out what happens to the characters in the onestopenglish soap opera, The Road Less Travelled. So, will Sal marry Rich? Will Katie confess all? Will Michael finally ask Katie out on a date? In anticipation of the launch of Season Two, we've prepared a special trailer to remind you of the story so far...

We've had lots of entries in the Onestopenglish Video Dictionary Competition and, after some serious debate here at onestopenglish HQ, we've chosen this worthy winner for October!

Onestopenglish Web Editor, Lucy Williams, writes:

Welcome to the onestopenglish Staff Room Open Day! This month, we're showcasing our huge range of subscription resources - click here to take a sneak peak inside the Staff Room.

September also sees the launch of Adrian Underhill's interactive phonemic chart. This excellent teaching tool can be played full-screen and gives clear audio examples of the English phoneme set.

The onestop reporters have been busy over the summer, travelling far afield to bring you Live from Oxford and Live from Edinburgh. And this month, the intrepid duo are back in London, asking locals and visitors questions about music and the news.

There's lots more great content - take your time to explore and enjoy another packed edition of onestopenglish!

Onestopenglish Web Editor, Lucy Williams, writes:

This month we think you should... check out the integrated skills video projects by our author of the month, Jackie McAvoy. Make sure you send us a link to the videos your students make - we'll show the best here on the site and add them to the onestopenglish YouTube channel.

Speaking of YouTube, we had some fantastic entries to the Onestopenglish Video Dictionary Competition. Thanks to everyone who's entered - keep your videos coming in as we haven't chosen a winner yet and the prize is still up for grabs!

And did you know that you can now receive the weekly news lessons as podcasts? Each week, we record an extract from the weekly news lesson and publish it as a podcast. Read Tim Bowen's tips and suggestions for ways to integrate these podcasts into your lessons.

There's lots of other great content, so please take time to explore and enjoy another packed edition of onestopenglish!

This month we think you should... enter the Lesson Share competition! The onestopenglish Lesson Share competition has launched several successful writing careers. Why not raise your own profile by being published on the world's best ELT website? We all know that the best lessons are created by teachers, for teachers and our Lesson Share competition gives you the opportunity to share your ideas with English teachers across the globe.

February on onestopenglish sees the launch of a new series of dictionary skills lesson plans by Tim Bowen. These worksheets are pitched at three different levels and aim to train learners in dictionary use and to help develop their vocabulary.

January's Young Learners lesson share competition was won by Dennis Baker for a fun lesson on creative writing (The three boxes writing activity). This month, the competition is back to normal, with no particular theme, so send us you ideas!

We've also launched a Facebook group for our audio soap opera, The Road Less Travelled. There is a profile page for Katie, the main character, and an open group for discussion. Each month we would like to add to Katie's Facebook page - either by completing her profile, adding pictures or posting notes from her. And we need your help - this is where you and your students come in! Find out more here.

There's lots of other great content so please take the time to explore and enjoy another packed edition of onestopenglish!

Have you heard about the ever-growing online phenomenon known as Second Life? It's a 3D virtual world inhabited and created by millions of 'residents' from around the globe.

A view of Second Life

We’ve got some great new pronunciation material on onestopenglish this month, including a brand new series of articles and activities by Adrian Tennant. The first article explains why it's so important to teach pronunciation and the additional activities focus on the difference between two phonemes. The audio to accompany this series can also be received as a podcast.

Continuing with the pronunciation theme, we’re offering all Staff Room members a 50% discount on Adrian Underhill’s essential guide to teaching pronunciation, Sound Foundations. We’ve also published an article by Alex Case on approaching pronunciation with Business English students.

Adrian Doff has launched his new ‘Business tasks’ series with an introductory article and lesson plan designed to help students talk about their work experience. And, as if that wasn't enough, Lynda Ross has sent us another update on her experience as a volunteer teacher in Cambodia while Anila Scott-Monkhouse is this month's lesson share winner with a creative lesson on Fantasy creatures.

Last month we asked our users to vote for their favourite photo from a shortlist of entries in the Staff Room photography competition. We had a record number of votes in what proved to be our most dramatic poll to date and, although it was extremely close between three of the photos, a clear winner eventually emerged.

We also hope that you’re keeping up with the onestopenglish soap opera, The Road Less Travelled. In Episode 4 Katie broke the news to Mark that she would be leaving to visit her cousin in California. We'll be publishing Episode 5 this week so don’t forget to listen.

Finally, in a few weeks time, onestopenglish author Jamie Keddie will be speaking at TESOL France's Annual Colloquium. This year the event is devoted entirely to the teaching of spoken communication in all its forms and Jamie will be running a workshop on using corpora in the classroom. He will consider how user-friendly corpora such as Internet search engines, the iTunes music store, online film scripts and even your own hotmail account can be used to aid language learning.

We always welcome feedback on the site, so if you'd like to contact us directly with any inspired ideas or relevant comments and suggestions then don't hesitate to get in touch- we'd love to hear from you! webeditor@macmillan.com

Our October upload went live at the beginning of last week and Thursday saw the publication of Episode 2 of the new onestopenglish soap opera, The Road Less Travelled. In this episode, Katie is reluctantly dragged off to watch football with her boyfriend and his friends (again) and ends up being asked to fetch and carry snacks for them. How much can one girl take?

The Road Less Travelled and the intermediate-level Macmillan Reader, The Space Invaders are both now available as podcasts. This means that you have the option to automatically receive the latest instalment in a series as soon as it is added. To find out more about podcasting on onestopenglish and how to set it up, please visit our Audio and podcasts FAQ page.

Last month we asked our users to send us photographs of them in their 'staff room', hoping for a snapshot of varied teaching circumstances. We received lots of great entries alongside a few slightly puzzling ones. Nine finalists have been selected and we're asking you to vote for the winner. Click here to have a look through the entries and vote for your favourite using the poll on the left-hand side.

This month we also launched a new teaching diary. Lynda Ross is about to embark on a voluntary teaching placement in Cambodia and has agreed to send us regular updates on her experience. The series kicks off with a letter introducing Lynda and documenting her preparations and expectations. If you have any useful advice for her, you can leave your comments in our forum.

We always welcome feedback on the site, so if you'd like to contact us directly with any inspired ideas or relevant comments and suggestions then don't hesitate to get in touch - we'd love to hear from you. webeditor@macmillan.com

The onestopenglish Staff Room celebrates its first birthday this month!

The Staff Room was developed in response to requests from our users who wanted a greater number and variety of teaching resources. Over the past year, thousands of visitors to the site have discovered how membership to the Staff Room unlocks a fully-searchable database containing thousands of lesson plans, worksheets, audio files, interactive games and flashcards which members can download and use in their classrooms.

Our ambition is to make onestopenglish the place online where you can come to find practical and accessible resources to use in the classroom, as well as to share your ideas and discuss issues in ELT. The Staff Room is our next step in achieving this ambition.

It's strange looking back to the site as it was over a year ago - onestopenglish has grown and developed so much over the last 12 months that the launch of the new site, on 23^rd August 2006, seems a lifetime ago. It's been a great year for onestopenglish and all the team are very proud of what we've achieved. Here are some of the highlights:

• Weekly topical news lessons based on articles from the Guardian, edited to three language levels and with accompanying activities.
  
• Monthly articles and lesson plans published across all levels and in a range of subject areas, including Business and ESP, Skills, Exams, Grammar and Vocabulary and Young Learners. These materials are all written by our dedicated team of expert ELT authors.
  
• M Tunes - an innovative multimedia series for children featuring contemporary live-action and animated music videos. Each video is accompanied by a set of interactive games, which are designed to practise and improve the skills, vocabulary and grammar presented in the songs. We publish two videos and ten interactive games every month for Staff Room members.
  
• The weekly serialization of Macmillan Readers as podcasts, accompanied by specially commissioned listening activities. So far we have published adaptations of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Northanger Abbey.

 Live from London - a series of authentic listening materials, based on short interviews with visitors and locals, covering such themes as Breakfast, Sights and Living in London. The accompanying lesson plans, by onestopenglish author Lindsay Clandfield, are suitable for learners with a range of language levels.

Coming soon...

The Onestopenglish Team is very excited to announce the launch of the Onestopenglish Soap Opera, The Road Less Travelled, this month! Meet Katie – a young girl who's so bored with her life in the UK that she travels to California to make a fresh start. What happens to the boyfriend she leaves behind? And who is the tall, handsome stranger she meets on the plane? Log on to onestopenglish next week to tune in to episode one!

We always welcome feedback on the site, so if you'd like to contact us directly with any inspired ideas or relevant comments and suggestions then don't hesitate to get in touch - we'd love to hear from you. Send your comments to webeditor@macmillan.com.

Becca Sams

At the beginning of August we published lots of fantastic new content including the first in a new series of ETp articles. This first article is available to all onestopenglish users. In it, Michael Hoey, the chief advisor on the Macmillan Dictionary of English for Advanced Learners, considers the consequences of changes in lexicography. There will be more of these methodology articles for Staff Room members in the coming months so keep your eyes peeled! This month Staff Room members can also benefit from a 20% discount on a subscription to ETp magazine.

You may have already noticed our summer series of podcasts 'Live from London'. We've now published four of these and in the latest one we visited a language school in South West London and asked teachers and students what they considered to be the most difficult aspect of learning English. These have been great fun to make and, accompanied by the lesson plans written by Lindsay Clandfield, they form an excellent source of authentic listening practice. Find out more here.

Becca interviews students for the 'Live from London' podcasts

In September the onestopenglish Staff Room will be celebrating its first birthday so we're busy making plans and preparing lots of exciting content and offers to mark this special landmark. We're really proud of the amount of content that we've added to the site in the last year and intend to continue doing so as we move forward. Look out for the new onestopenglish soap opera podcasts in the middle of September!

We always welcome feedback on the site, so if you'd like to contact us directly with any inspired ideas or relevant comments and suggestions then don’t hesitate to get in touch - we'd love to hear from you. Send your comments to webeditor@macmillan.com.

Here's another great new feature on www.onestopenglish.com.

Over the last year, the demand for audio resources on onestopenglish has grown considerably, especially for authentic, native-speaker English language resources. In response to that demand, we're delighted to announce a new section on the site – the Live from London podcasts.

In 'Live from London' we go to different parts of London to ask locals and visitors questions about their daily lives.

London is home to more than eight million people. It is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the world. You can encounter more than 300 different languages in London and people from every continent in the world. The ‘Live from London’ podcasts bring some of this diversity into your classroom.

Each podcast includes:

• an audio file of around two minutes in length.
• interviews on stimulating topics your students will identify with.
• authentic recordings of visitors and locals in London.
• a variety of accents, including British and North American English.
• a worksheet with vocabulary, listening and speaking activities prepared by onestopenglish author Lindsay Clandfield.
• teacher's notes with answer key, tapescript (including details of where the speakers are from) and extra suggestions for exploitation in class.

In the first of these podcasts, we went to London's South Bank and asked people the question: 'What do you usually have for breakfast?'

Check out the onestopenglish Staff Room to find out more.

'Our June upload went live at the beginning of last week and we've published lots of fantastic new content, including the first two M Tunes videos. M Tunes is an award-winning multimedia series for children featuring contemporary live-action and animated music videos. Each video is accompanied by a set of interactive games which are designed to practice and improve the skills, vocabulary and grammar presented in the songs. If you're a Staff Room member (allowing you access to our subscription area), have a look at the Robot Calypso video and you won't be able to resist singing along - be warned, it's really catchy!

Robot Calypso

In the free area of the site we've published a reading lesson on Maritime mysteries, a lesson on Glastonbury festival (as part of our Festivals Lesson Share Competition) and launched a new series of TKT (Teaching Knowledge Test) tips by Jim Scrivener.

In addition to all our usual content, Staff Room members can also benefit from a 50% discount offer on Blended Learning by Pete Sharma and Barney Barrett. There was a lot of buzz surrounding this book at IATEFL in April and Pete Sharma recently gave a presentation on the subject at our head offices in London. The book contains a wealth of practical ideas and suggestions for ways to use technology to enhance and support your students' learning. 

Finally, we've also put together a short survey to ask our users how they are currently using the site and what they think we can do to improve it. The survey can be taken anonymously but as a thankyou for participating, we'd like to offer all entrants the opportunity to be entered into a draw to win an Olympus SP-310 digital camera worth over £200. All you need to do is enter your email address when prompted.

We always welcome feedback on the site, so if you'd prefer to contact us directly with any inspired ideas or relevant comments and suggestions then don't hesitate to get in touch - we'd love to hear from you. Send your comments to webeditor@macmillan.com. 

'We're somewhere in the middle of our monthly publishing cycle here at onestopenglish. For those of you who aren't familiar with the site, onestopenglish.com is the world's leading ELT resource site with over 420,000 users (and counting!).

Our editorial team consists of Claire Pye (Commissioning Editor), myself (Web Editor) and Lucy Williams (Editorial Assistant), so we're a bit smaller than many people imagine but still somehow manage to upload an impressive amount of content each month (all modesty aside).

At the beginning of May we published some great content, including reports by Lindsay Clandfield and Karen Richardson on last month's IATEFL conference in Aberdeen, ideas from Jim Scrivener on how to use receipts in the classroom, a reading lesson by Jackie McAvoy on events connected with the moon and, of course, our regular monthly news lesson in association with the Guardian Weekly.

In the Staff Room area of the site (our subscription service), we published a grand total of 30 different items, including 12 new downloadable interactive activities, two skills-related articles by Adrian Tennant (one on teaching writing and the other on reading), two Exams lessons, two Business & ESP lessons and a very cute lesson for Young Learners on how to make a puppet - dig out an old sock and some buttons! This was all in addition to our popular weekly news lessons and podcasts (we are currently offering the beginner-level Macmillan Reader, Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen).

Next month we will be publishing a survey to find out what our users think of the site as it is now and to give them the opportunity to tell us how we can make it even better.

We're really proud of onestop and always welcome feedback on the site. So, if you have any relevant comments, inspired ideas or suggestions, please get in touch - we'd love to hear from you. webeditor@macmillan.com

Oh, and don't forget to check out our competitions page - we need your anecdotes and lesson plans!'

Are you a regular onestopenglish user? What's your best ever onestop inspired lesson? Leave a comment.

If you experience difficulties in leaving comments on the blog please let us know and send your comment to s.earnshaw@macmillan.com. We will post it for you.