Florida

Putting Education Reform To The Test

Teachers Earn Big Profits Selling Lesson Plans Online

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Teachers are selling lesson plans through an online marketplace. It seems unlikely vintage lesson plans will be worth more.

A Georgia Kindergarten teacher has earned more than $1 million selling lesson plans to other teachers through a website, according to Bloomberg Businessweek.

Deanna Jump’s story is unusual, but two teachers have earned more than $300,000 and nearly two dozen have earned more than $100,000.

Here’s how it works:

Since signing on to the site, she has created 93 separate teaching units and sold 161,000 copies for about $8 a pop. “My units usually cover about two weeks’ worth of material,” she says. “So if you want to teach about dinosaurs, you’d buy my dinosaur unit, and it has everything you need from language arts, math, science experiments, and a list of books you can use as resources. So once you print out the unit, you just have to add a few books to read aloud to your class, and everything else is there, ready to go for you.”

The site, TeachersPayTeachers, was created by former New York middle school English teacher Paul Edelman. As with DonorsChoose.org, it’s another way teachers are tapping the Internet to benefit students.

Edelman believes teachers will create better lesson plans if they think they might get paid for their efforts. More than 15,000 teachers have joined the site.

What do you think of the idea? Would you consider buying or selling a lesson plan?

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