The MEC word games for June are available now! How many words can your students find in Witch's Pot? This month's topics are 'types of music' (Easy), 'words which can mean "first"' (Average) and 'words which mean "surprised"' (Difficult).

The Swamp Disaster topics are 'clothes and related words' (Easy), 'find the countable noun' (Average) and 'relationships' (Difficult).

 Swamp Disaster

The Wordsearch topics are 'eating out'(Easy), 'types of ship or boat' (Average) and 'negative adjectives describing character' (Difficult).

As usual, there are new Crosswords and Bridge Builders at all levels too.

Visit the Word Games area to find them all. Which are your students' favourite word games? Please let us know.

 Wordsearch

The 'one and only' news item

This week's news item, adapted for MEC from a news article originally published in the Guardian Weekly, looks at protests in China against the government's policy of allowing only one child per family. Find out why people are protesting by going to the Headline News section on your Study Area screen.

8) What are your tips for new teachers using MEC?

'New to teaching or new to MEC? Either way, make it your own - but see what your students want of it. If you really are new to it, get a couple of your students - or some likely people - and sit there with them as they negotiate their way round it, and talk about it with them.'

9) What are your views on blended learning?

'Well, when I went to school/university/tried to learn various languages independently, the expression "blended learning" didn't exist. But combining or integrating resources and environments such as libraries, lectures, seminars, informal study groups, etc is what studying has always involved. And it still will, long after every single currently used PC is long defunct and buried in the Ozymandian sand of global warming.

Learning is tied up with crucial interdependencies between the social/interactional and the material. In the three years I spent at Oxford University doing my first degree, I had between 100 and 150 hours of one-to-one or paired tuition. Looking back, it doesn't sound like much, but it was very powerful. The rest of the time consisted of using the various other resources.

The thing that matters is that those few 'real' hours (i.e. face-to-face, real-time and absolutely not replaceable by any IT mediation) were the skeleton that made sense or gave shape to all the rest of it.'

10) What do you think the future holds for ELT teachers and authors?

'Teachers are no different from anyone else. If your job is very basic and poorly paid, nobody will be bothered to develop the software to replace you. If you're very highly paid and specialist beyond the ken of software developers, you too will be left alone.

Teachers float around between these two poles. Of course, it depends where you live, and at what level of the socio-economic scale your pedagogic efforts are directed.

Paperless IT-mediated educational material I suppose is likely to prove more helpful to most - it saves money in the end, it's easier on the planet and so on. But it requires a lot of costly hardware. I hope the rich/poor divide in the world isn't increased by all this. We need a lot more of the equivalent of the wind-up radio.

English is growing as a lingua franca, and inexorably so. Others will follow.

This takes me to areas where my head starts to hurt. I despise nationalism; but I think globalisation is a nonsensical and transparent veil for pre-Marxian exploitation.

Authors? I suppose we'll have to write either more and more for children or for increasingly specialised areas.'

Wind-up radio. Is clockwork the future for technology?

Do you have any response to Russell's comments? What do you think the future holds for English language teachers? Leave a comment.

Week Two

MEC Commissioning Editor and recent CELTA graduate, Jenny Lovel, writes:

'I start week two feeling quite tired, having spent the weekend at the IATEFL conference in Aberdeen. In the interview for my CELTA course I was asked if I had any social events planned that would prevent me from doing my coursework. Instead of being honest about the conference, I said that I didn't have any plans for the whole month. Consequently, sneaking up to IATEFL seems like having an affair and carrying textbooks in my conference bag like telltale lipstick on a collar. But at IATEFL I realise how much I've learnt in a week and feel heartened that the hard work I'm putting in is paying off.

Jenny's class at IH London

In contrast to the first week, in week two we have to submit lesson plans for assessment. These have to detail learning objectives, stage aims, timing, analysis of target language and even a whiteboard plan. Confident the plan shouldn't take more than a couple of hours, I spend most of the evening combing magazines for photographs to illustrate my lesson on lexis for special occasions. When I've stuck pictures of happy couples, birthday presents and glasses of champagne to clashing pieces of cardboard I turn to the lesson plan. Fast-forward five hours and I'm still writing. The plans are unbelievably time-consuming, and need revising constantly. Working out the timing of each stage of the lesson requires military precision and yet it's hard to know how long the students will need. I don't want to be left twiddling my thumbs for ten minutes at the end of the lesson making small-talk and yet I similarly don't want to have to finish mid-activity.

Planning is a nightmare and I'm starting to have a newfound respect for teachers. In my lesson observations I realise, with a mix of envy and despair, how easy they make it look. The lessons are relaxed, the teachers have good rapport with the students, there are clear aims and, perhaps most importantly, at no point does the teacher look at his or her watch, mutter an expletive and start cantering towards the end of the lesson leaving the students behind. I learn a great deal from watching these experienced teachers and find this aspect of the course invaluable.

As the weekend approaches I start counting down the hours to my well-deserved lie-in and vow to have Saturday off. It's the end of week two.'

Does this bring back memories for you? Do you remember your first ever lesson? How much time do you spend planning these days? Leave a comment.

Korean train journey keeps MEC news on track

Katowice

Blended learning expert, Pete Sharma, writes:

'Katowice in Poland was the venue for the second IH Country Fair. The structure of the day involved three different types of training.

Firstly, the input of new knowledge. Participants were new to the Campus, so this was training in the pure sense of the word: to teach with MEC, you need knowledge of the product.

After lunch, participants reflected on the respective roles of the teacher and the technology. This type of training, or "teacher development", is fascinating.  As the teacher trainer, I devised a task in which I predicted the answers. However, the task outcomes were different to my model answer. Such divergence illustrates the value of running INSET (in-service training) as a chance to hone your views and test your principles against those of colleagues.

The day concluded with a hands-on session. This is skills training and the session took place in a lovely self-access centre. At one point, each of the four groups was completely absorbed in the language games - undeniably one of the highlights of the Campus.

What about training in your school? Does it include all three of the above? To integrate Campus successfully, the message seems to be: train, train, train! If you don't adapt to technology, then your school might simply ... miss the train.

This day was especially significant as no school in the country is using the Macmillan English Campus, so IH Poland have a real chance to forge ahead with a visible USP.

A huge thank you to Bronwen, Director of Studies at IH Katowice, for organising the day.'

The participants

Which learning processes are best supported by the teacher and which by technology? Where do the two overlap? Leave a comment.