My grumpy old man blog of yesterday touched a few nerves. After the enormous success of Eats,shoots & leaves I shouldn't be surprised that the subject of spelling and use of English is a popular issue. I suppose the problem starts in schools. And if it's difficult to teach British kids how much harder is it to teach English to non-native speakers.

About five years ago Macmillan Education launched onestopenglish to offer teaching resources, tips and support to teachers of English throughout the world. It has been a huge success with 350,000 registered users who come back time and again. The material is free and usage has not been restricted at all.

Fine and dandy and very web 2.0 but we needed to develop the site further, to pay top-class professional writers, teachers and developers and to create a web 3.0 level of service. This requires an income stream but we could not risk losing our loyal users. We therefore developed a subscription site, the Staff Room where we have responded to user feedback gathered via questionnaires, workshops and focus groups by generating new 'missing' material, enhanced search, comprehensive support materials and much else.

Teachers of English are not wealthy and we have therefore kept the subscription price to the lowest possible level - £2 per month - and onestopenglish users have already begun to convert in good numbers (we launched last Thursday). Do have a look at onestopenglish and if you are a teacher of English do take out a subscription to the Staff Room - it's worth a go.