Press Coverage

How a Teacher Made $1 Million Selling Lesson Plans

Deanna Jump is not a trust fund baby. She never married into money and she has never won the lottery. But in the past year-and-a-half, the 43-year-old kindergarten teacher in Warner Robins, Ga., has earned more than $1 million. Her unlikely strategy: selling catchy kindergarten lesson plans to other teachers.

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Gasp! Thanks To These Startups, Teachers Are Making Money On The Web

Teaching. In spite of George Bernard Shaw's now infamous "those who can't do" proverb, teaching is one of the most important professions out there. Even for the many self-taught coders among us, at some point along the way, we've all had our lives shaped by a great teacher - in the classroom, or out. That's why, on the whole, teacher compensation in the U.S. is embarrassing. To pick on marketers, some might see the fact that the average marketing manager makes twice the average salary of most teachers as just a wee bit backwards. Luckily, there are a number of startups that are starting to change that, thanks to the Web and the growing popularity of open, online educational platforms.

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Kindergarten Teacher Earns $700,000 by Selling Lesson Plans Online

Teaching isn't known to be a lucrative profession, but online marketplace Teachers Pay Teachers is changing that for some educators. Deanna Jump, a kindergarten teacher from Georgia, has made $700,000 selling her lesson plans on Teachers Pay Teachers, an ecommerce startup where teachers offer their lesson plans to fellow educators. Paul Edelman, the founder of Teachers Pay Teachers, created the platform following a four-year stint as a New York City public school teacher.

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TeachersPayTeachers Means Those Who Can T1each Can Make Bank

When you hear about a tech startup that has grossed $5,000,000 in sales, operates internationally, and connects people with common interests, you might imagine a new virtual game or social network. TeachersPayTeachers is neither of those things. Instead, it is a marketplace for teachers to sell their lesson plans to other teachers, and make a tidy profit off of their work.

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TeachersPayTeachers Millions of Dollars

For Paul Edelman, venturing out in business on his own was just a matter of time. After teaching for four years in New York City public schools, he was struck by the concept of an open marketplace for teacher-created materials. "I knew how valuable good materials were—all teachers know this as they seek out the best stuff from their colleagues", Paul says. "And, usually, when we value something, we are willing to trade money for it". Though assigning monetary value to teacher-created materials hadn't been tried before in quite the same way as Paul was envisioning, he was confident it would work.

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Ga. Teacher Turns Lesson Plans into Big Business

WARNER ROBINS, Ga. - A Warner Robins teacher has found the ultimate after-school job, and it's making her a pretty penny. She's come up with a way to make the lives of teachers easier, while also making teaching lucrative.

Lesson planning is one of the most difficult and most time-consuming parts of the job for teachers. But Deanna Jump is drastically reducing that time for the other teachers, while making a good chunk of change for herself.

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Teachers Can Double Their Salary With Nifty Startup TeachersPayTeachers

Startup TeachersPayTeachers, which is based near Paris, is attacking the education market from a unique angle.

Its creating a market for Teachers to buy and sell course materials like lesson plans, and tests.

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Educator marketplace TeachersPayTeachers pays out over $1M for lesson plans

Online marketplace TeachersPayTeachers offers a fairly direct proposal for educators: You can get paid for your lesson plans and other teaching materials.

And it seems many teachers are biting — the company paid out over $1 million to educators in 2010, more than sales in its first four years combined, founder Paul Edelman told VentureBeat.

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Lesson plans for sale

She created her own company, Secondary Solutions, in 2005, and one year later began selling materials online via www.teacherspayteachers.com (TPT), boosting her sales and recognition. Last year she earned $40,000 from TPT, making her the top-selling teacher in the nation.

Bowers is a new breed of educator that some call a "teacherpreneur". Thanks to the Internet, teachers can now sell materials that previously could only be shared with a few colleagues. While the practice has raised some eyebrows, teacherpreneurs say the advantages go beyond monetary value.

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Selling Lessons Online Raises Cash and Questions

Between Craigslist and eBay, the Internet is well established as a marketplace where one person's trash is transformed into another's treasure. Now, thousands of teachers are cashing in on a commodity they used to give away, selling lesson plans online for exercises as simple as M'M sorting and as sophisticated as Shakespeare.

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Teacher Magazine: A Lesson Earned

There's a venerable legend about inventing the high-tech world's Next Big Thing: All you need is to do is disappear into your garage with a computer and a really terrific idea, and what you come out with may change the world. Scaled down to the teaching world, and allowing for a few variations in time and place "it's not the late 1970s, and New York City has few garages of the type Microsoft founder Bill Gates or Apple co-creator Steve Jobs did their fiddling in" that's what former teacher Paul Edelman has in mind with teacherspayteachers.com.

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Ed Week: Site Launched for Teachers to Sell Their Lesson Plans

Teachers who think the lesson plans and worksheets they have created are good enough to sell now can test that idea in an online marketplace.

Launched earlier this year by a former New York City teacher, the TeachersPayTeachers.com Web site charges teachers $29.95 a year to offer their wares. The site functions much like eBay or Amazon.com's marketplace, with buyers deciding whether the products are worth the cost and then providing user ratings to help those who come after them. Prices, set by the sellers, go from a dollar or two up.

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AP Story: A lesson in finance: Teachers sell their original work online

WASHINGTON (AP) -- For all those teachers who take work home at night, creating lessons they hope kids will like, the reward is a good day in class. Now there could be another payoff: cash...

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LA Times Story: Educators across the U.S. are using a new website to buy and sell reliable class materials

As a young teacher, Kristen Bowers toiled night after night, struggling to grade tests and come up with innovative teaching materials for her English courses at South Hills High School in West Covina.

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For the First Time New eBay-like Website Allows Teachers to Buy and Sell Original Course Materials

TeachersPayTeachers.com, the first open marketplace for original teacher-created materials, launched this month and is expected to help thousands of teachers buy and sell original curricular resources. According to Paul Edelman, founder of this program and a former New York City public school teacher, "When I was teaching, I felt a great need for better sharing among teachers, not merely in my school but across the country and world. I believe this site will transform the way teachers share - and teachers will have the extra bonus of raising additional cash"... Read the entire story at Associated Content.com. Click Here

Lessons for Sale: Looking for a cool curriculum? Step right up.

Need to teach a class on Death of a Salesman? Or perhaps you've created a lesson on the Industrial Revolution that wows your students. You're in luck.

A new cottage industry for time-pressed teachers has flowered, one in which classroom lessons are the coin of the realm. Earlier this year, for instance, a new Web site called TeachersPayTeachers.com - essentially an eBay for educators - was launched. For a $29.95 yearly fee, sellers can post their work and set their prices. Buyers rate the products.

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Teachers Selling their Lesson Plans Online

Ken Norman used to give away to other teachers lesson plans that he had spent hours and hours creating for high school government and economics classes.

But times have changed.

Online auction sites and marketplaces can make anyone an entrepreneur, and Norman has joined the thousands of teachers buying and selling lesson plans online. A nine-week Texas history course with a syllabus, quizzes and tests can retail for $10. Colorful diagrams to help kindergartners learn to count using coins go for $3.

Read the entire story at dallasnews.com. Click Here