Online auction sites and marketplaces can make anyone an entrepreneur, and now thousands of teachers are buying and selling lesson plans online, reports the Dallas Morning News. On these web sites, teachers can browse and buy lesson plans for students in pre-K through 12th grade in every imaginable subject. The burgeoning business also lets teachers cash in on the everyday materials they have created. In some cases, teachers have boosted their incomes by selling thousands of dollars worth of lesson plans a year. Legal and ethical questions remain, however. Who owns the education materials, and does a school district deserve all or a cut of the money a teacher makes? So far, the answers aren’t clear. Online lesson-plan marketplaces, including ones that offer free materials, are so new that some North Texas school districts say they haven’t heard of them. As a result, those systems say they have no policies or rules that directly apply to teachers buying or selling education materials. One of the more popular sites to emerge is Teachers Pay Teachers, which has more than 250,000 registered users and sales last year exceeding $500,000, said Paul Edelman, its founder. The site’s top grossing teacher is from California and has made more than $40,000, he said…
- ‘Buyer’s remorse’ dogging Common Core rollout - October 30, 2014
- Calif. law targets social media monitoring of students - October 2, 2014
- Elementary world language instruction - September 25, 2014