MASTER’S DEGREE IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES AND COMMUNICATION IN LANGUAGE EDUCATION AND PROCESSING (UNED)
Students’ opinions
"I (would like to) thank all the teachers by providing a demanding educational model with high impact on labour activity. A very special thanks to the Director of my TFM, Dr. Esteban Vázquez Cano, for providing me with a high-quality consultancy and monitoring the whole process of my work until its defence. To Dr. María Jordano, who effectively managed the TFM subject and made it possible to conduct this event via video conference. To Dr. Noa Talaván, for providing ongoing support in matters of the master’s degree. To Dr. Ana Maria Garcia Silva, coordinator of the UNED Centre in Lima, for the necessary coordination to complete our studies from there. Finally, to all the evaluation panel, for their generous contributions and wishes to continue my academic education by completing the doctoral thesis. In addition to the conditions for being able to undertake the defence using a video conference, sending scanned copies of the letters of Dr. Marco Martos Carrera, President of the Peruvian Academy of language/linguistics and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences of the National University of San Marcos, and Jorge Manuel Runciman Tudela, Head of the Department of Linguistics and Literature at the Universidad Nacional Federico Villarreal. In them the legitimacy of my participation is detailed from Lima. I remain at your disposal to express my sincere feelings of gratitude and esteem. "Mauro Marino Jimenez (Lima, 2012-13).
"I wish to express my profound gratitude. UNED has provided a number of opportunities for people who wish to develop a profession or specialise at postgraduate level with an obvious requirement and rigor, and I think that it is a privileged experience. I will be attentive to the calls for doctoral research stage, hoping to be able to complete work of major importance." Mauro Marino Jimenez (Lima, 2012-13)
"I started the master’s degree in October, 2012 and finished in just over a year, defending my thesis under the direction of Dr. Elena Martin-Monje, obtaining an Honours grade (10).
In the life of every person there are always three phases: one before, one during and after. I am writing this for the following reason: I have been working as an English teacher first at an academy and then as a school teacher in Secondary Education and Baccalaureate for almost 20 years. And I will continue in the same field because education is one of my great passions.
Practically, since I started working as an English teacher, Lifelong Learning has been a key factor in my professional life because, in my humble opinion, teaching is one of those jobs, in which continual renewal should be a compulsory and vocational task.
Until 2012-2013, at which time I considered convenient to enrol in the Master in ICT-ETL, after having undertaken detailed exploration of existing master’s degrees related to the field of ICT and education, I decided on the Master in ICT-ETL: undoubtedly one of the best decisions I ever made in my life.
In the first phase, my intention was simply to know and learn all the possibilities of the application of ICTs in the English classroom with my students in secondary and high schools. In the second phase I enormously enjoyed studying various subjects, such as "Advances en ELAO", "Web 2.0", "Second Life", "Editing audiovisual materials", and a long list of other activities, interacting using the forums on the aLF platform and exchanging ideas, opinions and experiences with other fellow students and teachers on the master’s degree. I could hardly imagine what might come in the third phase, which I have called "After the master’s".
After finishing the master’s degree, I had the opportunity to write reviews of some specialised books on ICT and Education. As of today, 09/08/2016, I'm already thinking about the 5th and 6th recension of two recently published books. I could defend my TFM at the I Congreso Internacional de Enseñanza del Inglés en Centros Educativos, held in Valencia, my hometown, on the first weekend of May 2016. At the end of the year my master’s thesis will be published in article format in the Proceedings of the Congress. I'm already planning to write another article for publication with a colleague and friend who I value a lot. I also collaborate in reviewing academic texts for RIED (Latin American Journal of Distance Education).
In the field of publishing, I am currently in contact with a publishing company of English books to be able to undertake English ICT Training and Teaching to fellow teachers.
To conclude, I only have to say that I have found "My Element*", ICT and Language Teaching, my two great passions. And all that thanks to and for the benefit of my students!!! "(Salvador Montaner, 2012-2015)
