MEC is currently being used by a number of customers in South America, including the Cultura Inglesa São Paulo (CISP). CISP is a chain of 27 language schools in São Paulo. They were the very first users of MEC, which they call the 'e-Campus'. They have been using MEC since 2003 and it is now used by 45,000 students and 750 teachers.

The Cultura Inglesa building in São Paulo

The Cultura schools have been very successful in incorporating e-Campus into their courses.

We caught up with Vilson Coimbra, e-learning manager for CISP, to find out more.

Supporting teachers

CISP has promoted the e-Campus to teachers energetically as Vilson is clear that this is the best way to integrate the e-Campus into the working life of the school. He explains how 'all new teachers are introduced to the e-Campus during our pre-service programme ... and work on its inclusion in their lesson plans.'

Indeed, at the LABCI conference last month, Vilson demonstrated in a presentation how effectively the e-Campus could be used with an interactive whiteboard, showing examples of creative activities that teachers could use.

All this really helps teachers to harness the potential of the e-Campus: 75% of teachers using it reported in a survey that they were 'Satisfied' or 'Very Satisfied' with its effectiveness.

Encouraging students

CISP continually encourages students to use the e-Campus at home as well as in the classroom. Research undertaken by CISP shows that 57% of students like using computers to learn English, and 71% say that MEC helps them to improve their English.

So how do they do it?

Crucially important is making sure that students are aware of what the e-Campus can offer. For example, the school's web portal offers sample resources and advertises new content that is published to the e-Campus by Macmillan. There have also been seasonal word games competitions for students to enter - which have proven to be very popular.

Vilson adds: 'Nowadays the e-Campus is part of the daily routine of students and staff. It is used in class as part of the practice needed for a specific language item or skill, as an assessment tool at the beginning of a term - and the exercises can be assigned for remedial work and revision.'

Murdoch buys Dow Jones

This week's news item, adapted for MEC from a news article originally published in the Guardian Weekly, is about Rupert Murdoch's takeover of the company Dow Jones and the possible impact this will have on its publications, such as The Wall Street Journal. Find out more about the takeover by going to the Headline News section on your Work Area screen.

As part of your lesson, you could direct students to The Wall Street Journal so they can get a clearer understanding of the material it publishes.

'Word of the Week' is a great tool for encouraging your learners to use their MEC wordlists. This week's word might be useful for advanced learners as it describes a dangerous activity, originating in the UK, which has recently become more popular with thrill-seekers.

To find the word of the week click on the 'New words' link at the top left of the dictionary.

The word of the week is updated every Monday.

For an interesting homework exercise for advanced learners, why not get them to use the word of the week as inspiration for a short story? Next lesson, share the stories with the rest of the class and add any new vocabulary they have found to their MEC wordlists.

For a fun revision exercise in a later lesson, try playing hang-man in teams with some of the new words you have learned from word of the week. Put the first and last letters of a word into the word list in your MEC teacher's Work Area. Enter the definition below the word and then click 'Done'. When you project your wordlist onto the whiteboard in class your learners will see the definition and the first and last letters as a clue.

When your learners guess a letter correctly, write it on the dotted line on the whiteboard. Even better, type the letters directly into your wordlist as your learners guess them.

To find the information you're most interested in on the MEC blog simply click on the categories button in the left hand margin of the page. There are currently four categories:

'Ideas for using MEC' is particularly useful as it contains information from MEC users around the world about how they have implemented MEC in their school. This posting, for example, has some very interesting comments about how various institutions are using MEC.

You can also click on the feed reader button next to the category to have category-specific updates. This means that your feed reader will receive notification every time that category is updated.

Don't forget:

To add this blog, or one of the blog categories to your feed reader simply click on the orange icon at the bottom of this page:

This will take you to a new page containing RSS data.

Copy the url of this new page and paste it into the 'Add new feed' field in whichever feed reader you use.

Your feed reader will now notify you of any new postings. Easy!

Monsoon mayhem

This week's news item, adapted for MEC from a news article originally published in the Guardian Weekly, is about a monsoon which has hit parts of Asia. Find out what has happened to the countries affected by the monsoon by going to the Headline News section on your Work Area screen.

Get your students to find out more about monsoons and their effects by clicking here.

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.

India awaits world's cheapest car

This week's news item, adapted for MEC from a news article originally published in the Guardian Weekly, is about the development of the world's cheapest car in India. Learn what effect the car is having on Indian society by going to the Headline News section on your Work Area screen.

Ratan Tata, of Tata Motors

Find out more about the company making the car by clicking here.

Silvia Tiberio

Hi! My name is Silvia Tiberio. I'm an author of ELT materials and I'm based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. As a freelancer, I build

MEC courses to accompany Macmillan titles.

MEC courses are an ideal tool to provide learners with further practice of the language taught in their coursebook. They

allow teachers to select resources and group them into syllabus items that match the units in a book.

I'd like to share a few tips with you for finding and selecting resources using the word and phrase search.

Don't forget about MEDO! To access it all you have to do is click on the Dictionary link in MEC as shown below.

Did you know that there are interactive games on the MEDO website? You can find them by opening the dictionary from the link shown above and clicking on 'Resource Site' which takes you to the 'Macmillan Dictionaries' page. On this page, click 'More interactive activities and games' which takes you to the 'Resources' page. Here, click on 'a whole host of games'. You will now see the 'Games' page and you can choose from the list of six games shown below.

Alternatively you can follow this link.

For a fun lesson warmer play one or more the games projected onto the whiteboard, or with an interactive whiteboard. If you don't have either of these available you can get your learners to play the games in pairs. You could even run a competition to see which pair can solve each game the quickest.

Your learners can use the online dictionary to look up any new words, either in class or for homework. Go over new vocabulary together and get them to choose the most useful words to put into their MEC wordlists.

We are delighted to introduce a new guest blogger today. Simone Sucupira is a teacher at Cultura Inglesa São Paulo (CISP) - Campinas. She writes:

Simone Sucupira

This year's LABCI conference invited us to discuss education in a situation of changing learning needs. We were challenged to think about what kind of education our society is likely to need in the near future. We asked ourselves the following question: 'How can we make a difference?'

Bearing this in mind, I chose the title 'The e-Campus and Self-Paced courses: the next revolution' for my presentation at LABCI.

Here at CISP, we've been using the e-Campus for quite some time and its adoption has revolutionized our regular courses. The e-Campus has made such a huge difference because although it's a single tool, it's brought many new innovations to our teaching! Here are some of the benefits of the e-Campus: 

•       It's a virtual learning environment which offers consistent content and flexible delivery: students can have optimized input of language anywhere, anytime they like.
  
•       It has added a new, less controlled, asynchronous element to our courses: students are much more free to decide what to do when they are not in the classroom. It promotes learner autonomy! 

One of my students, Guilherme Nunes, once told me: 'The e-Campus as it is now, offers students a lot.' This made me wonder what else we could offer given that the e-Campus has already been so successfully integrated to our courses. Then I realized that listening to what our students have to say about their learning needs is the key to understanding how we can make a difference.

Guilherme kindly granted me an interview which became the basis for discussing two of the most important questions I posed during my presentation:

•     What kind of learning opportunities could our students need that we might not be offering at the moment?
•     As an e-learning tool, has the e-campus achieved its full potential?

Here's Guilherme's interview.

In my presentation, I tried to demonstrate that the e-Campus currently offers students at CISP a great deal but has potential for much more! It might evolve from a supplementary tool into a self-contained, independent, on-line learning course.

At CISP we will be as ready to adapt as we are keen to offer the best learning opportunities to our students who, as in the case of Guilherme, sometimes cannot fit their schedules to our regular classes.

Football joy for Iraq

This week's news item, adapted for MEC from a news article originally published in the Guardian Weekly, is about Iraq's football victory in the Asia Cup and the celebrations it caused around the country. What might this victory mean for the future of Iraq? Find out by going to the Headline News section on your Work Area screen.

Your students can find out more about what happened in the Asia Cup by visiting the official website: http://www.afcasiancup.com/en/.

Once you have used this news item in class, you can refer your students to the news item from 14 November 2006 for more information about the war in Iraq. To find it just click on 'More News' in the Headline News area.

Six new worksheets with accompanying teacher's notes have been added to the MEC Support Site for you to use.

MEC Skills

Aimed at learners of MEC level 4 and above, these free downloadable worksheets are designed to highlight some of the most useful functionality in the Macmillan English Dictionary Online (MEDO). There are tips on:

• Finding collocations, phrasal verbs and idioms
• Finding and distinguishing between words with similar meanings
• Finding the right definition
• Expressions with get, go and take

You can use them in class with your learners, or give them out as homework.   

In the teacher's notes you will find guidelines on timing, tips for incorporating any work done with MEDO into your learners' Word Lists on MEC and a full list of answers to the learners' worksheet activities. There are also some great ideas for follow-up activities.

Click here to go straight to this new material.

We're always updating material on the support site so please feel free to leave us a comment if you have a suggestion for other downloadable worksheets you would like to see! 

Marcela Moya

In a 4,000 kilometre long country where distance is clearly not a choice, the British Institute in Santiago started developing distance learning programmes of English as a foreign language in 2000. In 2004, we decided to incorporate the English Campus as a powerful online source of EFL learning resources into our face-to-face and distance learning programmes. We soon realised that the potential behind the possibility of generating tailor-made courses for every type of internal and external user with a wide range of needs was simply enormous.

At the moment, we have created over 100 different courses for our language school face-to-face teen and adolescent students, face-to-face students from our recently launched Universidad Chileno Británica de Cultura – The British University, students from traditional state and private universities which have signed agreements with us to generate blended English programmes and an important number of 100% distance students spread out along the length of the country. The courses designed for this last segment include Cambridge ESOL KET, PET, FCE, CAE, CPE and IELTS exam preparation courses online and Cambridge ESOL TKT (Teaching Knowledge Test) three-module courses for EFL teachers in need of an international teaching certification.

Map of Chile