All Over the World with Passion, Love and Joy !

My name is María Sánchez Lerena.  I am an English Primary Education teacher. I like to learn about effective and innovative pedagogies, and I believe lifelong learning is one of the keys for professional fulfillment. Following this philosophy, this year I am obtaining the Blanquerna Master´s Degree “Teaching and Learning of the English Language for Kindergarten and Primary”. This Master´s is both challenging and demanding but at the same time enlightening and rich. Therefore, I feel very passionate about it, because it is giving me countless resources to be a better professional and maneuver myself around in the educational field.

On a more personal level I have a passion for travel, explore and cultural exchange. As a result, I have lived in Canada and Norway; and traveled around India, Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, Mexico, USA, Europe and all over Spain. My next stop will be Minnesota, where next year I will be working as an assistant teacher in a Spanish Immersion School. Furthermore, I am a nature lover, spending most of my free time either in the beach or the mountains. I profoundly enjoy and admire all the artistic disciplines. I adore cooking, reading, writing, painting, sculpting, doing arts and crafts, and I am addicted to sports.

After mentioning my passion for life and educational work, I must say that they both come together. As I see it, my knowledge and love for the English language has allowed me to discover and develop most of my passions in life. This awareness has motivated me to teach English as a way to open countless experiences provided by a fascinating and multicultural world.

One of the reasons why I chose this optional module is that I have always wanted to learn about ICT but unfortunately my Degree's ICT subject was rather poor.  Hence, my experience using most of these tools, is fairly recent and very exciting.  I started hearing about social bookmarking a couple of months ago. However, I did not have the time to start using it until the previous class session. Since then I have been exploring both Symbaloo and Delicious and I have also signed up for Diigo. I do not know if Pinterest is a social bookmark but I have also started to use it not long ago.  I find these tools brilliant. Not only do they help you save time by not having to look for the same resources several times, but they also help you save disk space and keep resources tidier. I am using Symbaloo to organize and access my high-frequency websites and to look for Webmixes that might interest me. Thanks to the possibility of tagging websites, I am using Delicious to classify and tidy specific resources and information that I encounter in a different way. And I am using Pinterest to look for inspiration and information in a more visual way.

In regard to social networks, I created my Twitter and LinkedIn account a couple of years ago. But I have not used them too much since. I used to think that Facebook and Twitter were almost the same. However, the last class made me see that Twitter can be very useful when it is professionally oriented. Now I am following classmates, teachers, educational platforms and influential educators; and they are helping me to be updated and in the loop. I used to use LinkedIn, but I stopped because of the free version limitations. Nevertheless, I want to open myself to unexpected national and international work opportunities. So I will try again and see if there is a way to overcome these limitations.

I know that we are not supposed to talk about RSS. But I wanted to comment that I am really enjoying Feedly and Flipboard. Usually I read a lot of articles on my computer and mobile phone. The problem was that I did not have a fast and convenient way to automatically follow blogs, find articles by topic and store the ones that I like. I am using Feedly to follow the updates of different blogs and websites, and Flipboard to find articles in a more visual way and create my own clippings magazines by topics.

To sum it all up, I love teaching, I love life and I love these tools! They make technological daily life easier, richer and more organized. They help you be updated about innovations and events. They give you national and international projection. And they are fun!