teachers selling study guides online?
Teachers are selling their original lectures, course outlines and study guides to other teachers through a new Web site launched by New York entrepreneur Paul Edelman.
The site, teacherspayteachers.com, aims to be an eBay for educators. For a $29.95 yearly fee, sellers can post their work and set their prices. Buyers rate the products.
“It’s a way to pat teachers on the back, to value what they do,” Edelman said. “They create the material night after night. The best way to value that is to put a price on it.”
Lots of Web sites offer lesson plans that can be purchased or downloaded for free. Yet Edelman says they don’t cover a fraction of what teachers themselves have come up with. By offering them a way to make a buck, the 33-year-old former teacher says he’s found a niche.
This would be a good use of money under my “teacher flex account” program. Rather than stocking and maintaining vast warehouses of supplies, individual schools might be better off taking their supply dollars and investing in the appropriate basic equipment (like a “document center”-style printer, laminators, computing, etc.) that meet many needs at once and allowing teachers to determine what supplies are needed for their classrooms. This might be a cheap way to get a lot of material at once.
When I saw the headline before reading the article, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up — I immediately thought of teachers selling class materials to students at their own schools, something for which public-school teachers would probably be hauled before their school boards. That’s not what’s going on here: it’s sort of like an “e-Bay for teachers”.
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