CONNECT LANGUAGE We’ve all been there. When you first started teaching as an ALT, everyone was excited to talk to you. You were bursting with ideas for fun and exciting games and activities. By the seventh time you were playing Jeopardy for review, however, you began to realize that your lessons just didn’t have the same spark as before. Enter Tayler Payne, the force behind Tay’s Teaching Toolkit. Tayler’s website provides beautifully designed PowerPoint templates for a wide range of classroom games. I had an opportunity to communicate at length with Tayler about her background, website, and tips for what makes a great PowerPoint game. The 31-year-old gave up a career as a graphic designer and moved from the US to Korea to become an ALT five years ago. As an ALT herself, Tayler understands what is necessary in a game that is not only exciting, but is also educational, fits the constraints of
a classroom setting, and can be adapted for a wide range of topics and grammar points. And with her background in design, Tayler’s games are as beautiful as they are fun. Like many new ALTs, she relied heavily on materials provided by others on online resource-sharing platforms. She stated that “The resources were well thought out, effective, and there were so many of them (which I was very grateful for). However, I noticed almost all of them were just missing that finishing touch aesthetically from a design perspective, especially the PowerPoint games, which my students absolutely loved to play. Pretty much everything I downloaded, I spent extra time redesigning. Furthermore, when you did find and download those games, often they required extra time and effort to edit them— whether it be updating the design, fixing animations and fonts, correcting mistakes, etc. That’s where Tayler’s Teaching Toolkit comes in.”
“ THE RESOURCES WERE WELL THOUGHT OUT, EFFECTIVE . . . HOWEVER, I NOTICED ALMOST ALL OF THEM WERE JUST MISSING THAT FINISHING TOUCH AESTHETICALLY . . .” 78 |
