Wouldn’t it be great if teachers could make more money than they do? Well, until that happens, there are, in fact, some ways they can do just that, including using the site that’s the subject of this Rising Resources blog, Teachers Pay Teachers! Educators are notorious for putting in tons and tons of work to make their classrooms look amazing, to create engaging and enjoyable activities for their students, and to basically give kids the most exciting time at school as possible.
For many teachers, this means spending their well-deserved free time creating templates, designing resources, and then perfecting them only to use them once or maybe twice. With Teachers Pay Teachers, however, they can offer these resources to other educators and make some extra money for themselves by selling their ingenuity to help their peers deliver great experiences for their students, too!
Teachers create everything from worksheets and formative assessments to projects, templates, and classroom decorations. And, that’s exactly what you’ll find on Teachers Pay Teachers. TPT was founded by Paul Edelman back in 2006 and, since its incorporation, it has helped millions of teachers around the world access innovative educational resources to help bolster their teaching. In fact, during the last year alone, five million teachers used TPT, they were responsible for creating and sharing three million resources on TPT, and over one billion resources have been downloaded from TPT all-time, according to their site!
Essentially, Teachers Pay Teachers is designed to help educators of all grade levels find new resources, knowledge, and inspiration to teach at their best. Some of the resources available on the site are available for free download while others are paid. As they say, they want the expertise and wisdom held by teachers to be able to be accessed by any educator from anywhere in the world. Plus, no one teacher can come up with thousands of creative ideas all on their own, so the collaborative and community-oriented nature of this marketplace is something that is extremely valuable for today’s educators.
Among the resources educators might come across on TPT include whole-unit lessons, full-year curricula, assessments, PBL activities, special education resources, videos, and digital lessons. They’re 100 percent created by real, classroom teachers, instructional specialists, administrators, homeschoolers, and other educational professionals. Since there are so many resources available on TPT, their website allows anyone who is searching to really get specific and find what it is they’re looking for. Teachers can search by grade level (in all 14 Pre-K-12 grades specifically), by subject, by price, and by resource type.
Many of the items on TPT are free or under ten dollars, which makes it great for those teachers who are shopping. For those teachers who are selling and providing their colleagues with these great opportunities, they have a ton of options. They can create their own stores (basically like a Facebook profile) in which all the resources they want to sell can be displayed. Furthermore, they can break the items in their store down by category and separate them by school subject, grade level, name, price, or what’s most popular! They can also give and receive ratings so other educators browsing their shop will know who’s got the best stuff!
Teachers who create resources or crafts and post them on TPT also tend to hold contests or run giveaways to help spread the word and build a larger professional network through the site. TPT has a very large presence on social media as well with tons of teacher followers and participants on Twitter and way, way more than that on Instagram! Once they create a TPT profile, teachers tend to hit the ground running and find, share, and create a ton of resources with educators from all around the world.
Whether educators are looking for materials to use for their students or for themselves, Teachers Pay Teachers is pretty much the only place they need to go. It’s pretty much like an ideal shopping trip for teachers since everything is so inexpensive and there are so many things that will catch their eye! After you check out TPT (and spent way too much time browsing through the offerings), don’t forget to head over to our store for the EdTech tools you need, too! And, be sure to follow us on Twitter and Instagram to keep up to date with everything EdTech! Happy Holidays!