Click on the link below to find flashcard heaven.

Learners love to do crosswords in class and it's a good way to revise new vocabulary. There are a few sites that allow you to create your own crossword. Below is a link to the one I found most useful when preparing for a class.

Remember there are also ready made crosswords in MEC. Just go to Games, and then Word Games.

Say au revoir to the long lunch

This week's news item, adapted for MEC from a news article originally published in the Guardian Weekly, is about the effect the current economic crisis is having on French people's eating habits.

Go to the News Items section on your Work Area screen to find out more.

Introducing the first Interactive Worlds...

Interactive Worlds are a flexible, topic-based learning resource, newly available to British English users of the Macmillan English Campus and subscribers to www.onestopclil.com.

With beautifully presented video, audio and interactive exercises, these content-rich Worlds are ideal for use in the classroom with a projector or interactive whiteboard and include integrated whiteboard tools, such as a pen, highlighter and colour palette.

The first three Worlds are the Animal Worlds, focusing on the natural environment. Each of these Worlds is divided into five or six zones which can be explored in any order and revisited over a period of time. Suitable for learners between the ages of 10 and 14, these vibrant resources will make students love learning English.

Key Features:

• A wide variety of topic-based material, covering a range of themes linked to the natural world

• A high level of visual attractiveness: students will love the appealing pictures of the natural world and the lively graphics

• Interactive, media-rich resource, including photos, audio and video

• Web projects, offering a chance for students to extend their knowledge by using authentic English on the internet

• Downloadable, customizable teacher's notes, providing suggestions for lead-in and follow-up skills practice for every zone in each of the Interactive Worlds

American English Interactive Worlds arrive in May 2009.

What better way to end October than with a trip to Paris? I spent two days training participants in inlingua Levallois. The participants were made up of Directors from each of the seven inlingua schools in and around Paris.

Directors in inlingua Levallois training room

Inlingua have over 300 training centres worldwide and mostly teach in company classes. As you can see from the photo the participants had lots of energy and enjoyed discovering all the things they can do on their MEC site.

Inlingua will be using MEC as part of their blended learning courses. They will be adapting some pre-built MEC courses to follow their syllabus and also creating their own courses. Students will have telephone lessons as well as online lessons each week.

Thank you to everyone who attended and made me feel very welcome.   

Obama proclaims rebirth of freedom

This week's news item, adapted for MEC from a news article originally published in the Guardian Weekly, is about the election of Barack Obama as the first black president of the USA.

Go to the News Items section on your Work Area screen to find out more about the significance of Obama becoming president.

Here is a selection of websites you and your students could look at in order to help them answer the Food for thought questions in the news item:

Long Island University - African American Slavery

Abraham Lincoln

Segregation in the United States

Online resources for young learners are ready and waiting to be discovered on your MEC site!

This clinic will show you around MEC Interactive Worlds, three sets of teacher led resources for learners aged 10-14. We will show you what's available in Animal World, Animals and Culture and The Natural World, how to navigate around them and how to complete the resources and track your learners' progress. The MEC Interactive Worlds clinic will last approximately 1 hour.   

We will be holding several sessions over the coming weeks. The dates and times are below:

·         Wednesday 19th November 4.00pm GMT

·         Friday 21st November 4.00pm GMT

·         Tuesday 25th November 2.30 pm GMT

·         Thursday 27th November 4.00pm GMT

·         Friday 28th November 09.30 GMT

·         Wednesday 3rd December 4.30pm GMT

·         Friday 5th December 9.30am GMT

·         Wednesday 10th December 9.30am GMT

·         Thursday 11th December 2.30 pm GMT

·         Friday 12th December 4.00pm GMT

If you can't make these dates or times please let us know and we will try to organize some more.

MEC clinics are short sessions involving small groups of no more than 10. They are on a first-come, first-served basis to any teachers who use MEC.

There is no cost involved: we will set up and host the sessions. Those attending simply need a web-linked computer with a speaker or headphones and ideally a microphone. 

If you are interested in attending this event or you require any further information, please let us know through the 'contact us' section of this site or by emailing s.milligan@macmillan.com.

MEC Worlds has been published to British English MEC sites.

Fair for all

This week's news item is our monthly news item for teens. It is about young people involved in the Fairtrade system.

Go to the News Items section on your Work Area screen to find out more.

You can also find longer versions of the news item with extension activities by logging in to our teachers' area here. 

You may remember we launched a competition in September using a Macmillan English Campus news item with voicethread. We asked your students to make comments about the news item and write or record them on our voicethread slide.

We are delighted to announce the winner of the MEC voicethread competition is class B2.2 from The British School of Trieste, Italy. We had great fun finding out what they had to say. You can see an example of their excellent comments below.

The British School of Trieste will soon own five brand new Macmillan readers as a prize for their great effort. If you'd like to find out more about voicethread click here.

Thank you to everyone who entered the competition and watch this space for the next one!

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.

If you're looking for something topical to do in class or as an exciting homework activity, why not use Barack Obama's acceptance speech? You can find the full speech, along with a transcript, on the website of the Guardian newspaper, here.

At 18 minutes and 20 seconds, the speech is quite long, but we think it's well worth watching for upper-intermediate or advanced students. They can read along with the transcript if they can't understand although, being a speech, the pace is quite slow. The Guardian also has shorter videos on a variety of topics, here.

Remember that you can easily link your video into MEC and send it to your students through the My Web Links area. Just go to My Web Links and click 'Add new' to create a New Weblink, as shown below. To publish your web Links to your students just click 'Publish weblink'.


 

If you'd like to see an online demo of how to create MEC Bookmarks, Word Lists or Web Links and then publish them to your students, click here.

MEC Senior Editor, Jeremy Smith, writes:

Farmers and vicuña profit from company's compassion

This week's news item, adapted for MEC from a news article originally published in the Guardian Weekly, is about Loro Piana, a company which is using its business to help farmers in Peru earn more money and protect the animals they tend.

Go to the News Items section on your Work Area screen to find out more about this company and how it is supporting the farmers and animals.

November word games

This month's Witch's Pot topics are 'types of book' (Easy), 'celebrations' (Average) and 'musical nouns' (Difficult).

The Swamp Disaster topics are 'words connected with cities' (Easy), 'personality adjectives' (Average) and 'describing landscape' (Difficult).

The Wordsearch topics are 'travel' (Easy), 'adjectives describing things in a bad condition' (Average) and 'adjectives describing feelings' (Difficult).

There are new Crosswords and Bridge Builders at all levels too.

Visit the Word Games area to find them all.