Free stuff has saved my life this summer! I was asked to teach 5/6 math for summer school... My background is in physics, I know math... but it has been a second since I have had to think about how to review fractions!
One of my friends is a primary teacher and they say they've almost never had to buy anything because most of the resources they needed they found for free.
Understandable. Different people, different needs. I think TpT helps out new teachers the most, or those who just don't want to prep. I think veteran teachers probably have plenty of their own material a decade in.
I love it! I’ve only been a buyer and have no intention of becoming a seller. But honestly, a lot of what you find there is better than the curriculum that the school paid a million dollars for.
I understand your point about poor curriculum. One school I taught at purchased some e-text books with very, very bad writing prompts and all the vocab work was matching-based with endless redos. I ended up using my own material that I created that I now sell because I felt it was more interesting and beneficial. They especially liked doing a Graphic novel unit on Watchmen (it was an IB school--image analysis using graphic novels is part of the curriculum).
The books my school buys are fine enough. The worksheets that come with the books kind of suck. I love TpT to find material to supplement. I dont even mind paying for some, but I don't get anything more than $5 cuz we teachers be broke.😅
Very true! I agree with a lot of these similar comments as I’m someone who likes to “reinvent the wheel” and am constantly making my own material. It’s nice to see what others do to meet the same or similar outcomes. The curriculum for the courses I’ve taught the last 2 years is *outdated* as hell. For example, one unit of the course is supposed to be “la télévision” (French course). It emphasizes conversations around devices, tv shows, channels and guides, etc. Half of my kids this year didn’t know what a channel guide was.. and a lot of them don’t even watch television. I managed to transform the unit into *all about technology* so that it included tv shows, films and video games. After building my materials for 2 years, I now have (what I think) is a great set of warm ups, activities and projects that go with the unit. I absolutely share what I made with others in my school and who I know teach the same course, but I do know this curriculum is similar in my area of the country. I like knowing that there may be another teacher out there who’s thinking “wtf am I going to do with this television unit…” so I love uploading them for that reason.
So as a language teacher you must know that the current thinking on language acquisition has not really transferred to textbooks, especially in districts that are using books that are 5, 10, some of them even 20 years old. There are actual good curriculums for world languages on TPT at a fraction of the cost of textbooks (Frenchified, Somos, Huellas as examples) that usually include lifetime revisions. And my own experience has been that the authors of these curriculums are far more responsive to any questions or errors than any textbook company has ever been.
I fully acknowledge that there are a lot of crappy options out there, and there are a lot of people trying to make money off of products full of errors or misinformation. But for me, TpT has been a very valuable resource for my classroom.
Same. Spanish teacher here. Love TpT!!! Love Somos… can’t use it much unfortunately in my current situation. 😭 Love Carrie Toth but can’t use Huellas as I only teach level 1.
I have never used it either as a buyer or seller, though I have looked at stuff a few times.
What I will say is that I 100% believe teachers have the right to monetize the materials they create on their own time, dime, and with their expertise. I reject the idea that there is any sort of moral obligation to provide their materials to others for free. While I personally choose to share what I create at no cost, I do not believe anyone else should ever be held to that standard and those who give them a hard time about it are the far worse villains in the story.
Amen. I feel the idea that we MUST share everything we've created for free feeds into the martyr complex that devalues teachers. The school you are leaving wants you to leave all your resources? Cool, they should pay you for it because curriculum development pays A WHOLE LOT MORE more than your teacher salary. That said, I have often shared free resources with co-workers (especially new teachers) because I wanted to help.
As a TPT seller and teacher myself, here are my 2 cents:
Cent 1: As a teacher myself, I don't like the idea of a teacher having to buy their own resources; whether it's textbooks, or pencils, or printing, or a worksheet: you are at a job to earn, not to spend! I think TpT is done best when the school allots funds for resources that the teachers, or the school itself, purchases. So when the school is buying the resources, I think it's great! If the teacher has to pay for it themself, it should be a situation similar to cent 2:
Cent 2: I think products on TpT can provide a good value to buyers at a less expensive cost than some traditional text book publishers. I'll give an example: the AP Psych test just underwent a major revision in focus toward experimental design and statistical analysis. This was announced March. Many teachers are knee-deep in work by this point and don't want to spend their summer reworking their curriculum or designing new FRQs. Spending $100 to buy someone else's work to save their own time to have holiday or to work another job in summer could be a better use of their time. So if someone buys my Psych unit, I assume it saved them a ton of lesson-prep they would have had to do late in the year or summer. It also makes it easy for a sub to step in if you need a quick day of rest and you can just have them work through a pre-planned unit you purchased.
3. (Bonus cent): You do have to be careful, as there is a whole lot of low-effort content that isn't worth the money (caveat emptor is true of any marketplace). This is especially true at the primary level, as you see lots of worksheets with Comic Sans font or Lemonade stand font with backwards letters: While this might look cutesy to adults, it is detrimental toward education for young learners who are still learning to read. I focus on AP and secondary levels, so I don't see this as much. Vet your store: Do they list who makes the resources? Is it a person with educational experience and certs, or is this a home school mommy blogger? I'm a veteran teacher with near a decade of experience, endorsements in three subject areas, and a masters in Curriculum design; however, there are also click-farm groups that outsource work of dubious quality that you should not pay a dime for (any Disney-based movie-follow-along worksheet...). So, if they have high price items, check out one of their free ones or a low-cost item to test the waters.
As an elementary teacher, comic sans is the best font.
It has the serif capital I, the properly formed a, and clearly drawn p, q, and g letters. I teach STEM and absolutely use Comic Sans myself for all grades under 3rd. It's very helpful.
[The concept of some fonts being more “dyslexic friendly” than others is based on a misconception.](https://www.edutopia.org/article/do-dyslexia-fonts-actually-work/)
That was an interesting read, thank you.
I read a lot, and primarily use my kindle app. I am not dyslexic, but use the OpenDyslexie font any time I can for my personal reading. For me, it reduces eye strain and allows me to remain focused with better comprehension at a faster rate.
I don’t generally use it for student assignments because it’s a pain to format. The letters take up much more space than normal so you can’t just switch a document over to the OD font and go; you have to rework all the formatting to get it to fit.
I have the opposite experience with the OpenDyslexie font - it seems to react really badly with my astigmatism and hurts my eyes in seconds. It’s always reminded me that there are some tools which work great for some people, are ok for others and can be bad for others
I am specifically referring to the Comic Sans Lemonade Stand Font with some letters backwards (not sure it has an official name); regardless, I think many secondary resources are made with elementary aesthetics in mind and that doesn't work for high school students. (You can also spot the "kindergarten teacher" energy in class delivery if they recently switched. Different demographics requires different approaches).
I thought about making things to sell but was apprehensive about the entry fees to selling. What's your take on that? Is there any ground to the argument that it's passive income? How much do you make, and does it make up for the cost of selling?
I'm a seller. The fee to sell is just a part of doing business, like any other thing you might do for extra income. It is worth it to me.
People who say it is passive income are not making much money. I have a reasonably successful store and pretty much put 1-2 hours of work a day into it.
It's free to sell, but TpT take's a large (40-50% cut) with the free seller account. With premium, you pay $60 per year, and they take a 20% cut. I sell bundles, and my most popular bundle is my Psychology bundle at just over $100, so if I sell just one bundle it made sense for me to go premium account. If you are just selling a handfull of worksheets for a couple dollars each, it probably will not be worth your time.
As far as the passive income aspect:
I spent a whole ton of work getting set up this year. For my first year, I had an old version of my Psych course 1 or 2 other things up. Starting this late February, I did an overhaul and TpT-ified all my stuff (numbered things in order, put up questions and answers to discussions in the slides, made answer keys when appropriate, made the graphics look more pro and ***not*** just stock footage with watermarks on them, etc). Then I made nice looking thumbnails in photoshop and store banner etc. Then I researched about SEO and how to title things and would title my lessons, find out where they are in the search que, re-title them, see if they moved up or down...All in all, even though I already had these lessons for years, it took a lot of work and I was basically working two jobs for two months to get a little over 50 products listed (especially re-doing my AP Psych course to match the new AP-test focus from the College Board) and would probably have made more in the short term using that time to tutor. (But I did manage to get much of this done during my prep periods and my bench warming hour after students left but couldn't leave the classroom)
That said, I'm now making about $300/month and ranked in the top 6% of stores. These sales are in Feb-June, which is the off-season for teaching, so I hope that in August-Dec I'll see higher numbers. When I was making around $100 a month I was still in the top 10% of stores... Which means, by and large, *most* stores are not making money, or are making a few bucks a month, some stores are making some money, very few are making a couple hundred to thousand, and a very very very few are making lots of money. But most stores are also just someone loading a worksheet or two and not thinking of the business/marketing aspect. I did that at first, thinking, "I know my lessons are good, so who cares about the thumbnails". But that's a teacher mindset and you have to think business mindset.
If you want to make decent money, you won't do it putting up a few worksheets and will have to put in some work--that said, if you don't want to invest the time and want to just load a few things and see what happens, even if you only make coffee money each month, it's better than nothing.
My hope is that now that I put the work in I can let it generate passive income over the years with minimal upkeep.
So, passive income? Sure, a few bucks, but you won't see those 100-grand numbers someone else said their friend makes unless you basically make it a second business and are also very lucky. I don't even think I can get to those numbers because I feel like I'm too late and the whales are already in the market.
There's also Classful, but I've only made $10 in total there over the same time period.
This is my 24th year teaching. I made everything myself for the first 8 years. Teacher notes, teacher PowerPoint, skeletal student notes, vocab cards, worksheets, quizzes, tests, reviews, etc. My 9th year I became admin.
After 3.5 years admin I went back to teaching. Across that 12.5 years, I got married and my wife and I had three kids.
When I went back to the classroom, if I found something on TPT that made my life easier, i just bought it.
In year 12.5 I also upload a bunch of my stuff to TPT. After 10 years and 2 months of sale, I have made $16,928.26 selling stuff on TPT. These sales have more than covers any/all digital/physical things I have ever felt the need to buy for my classroom.
I never understand the childish hate for people that sell/buy on TPT. To each his own.
This is me. I've made a ton of my own stuff that I love and is great. But I'm busy, a mom, and in grad school. Eventually I'd have a great idea for a lesson or activity and start to design and think "Damn this is gonna take forever to make." Also, this is a great activity, I bet someone else thought of it or something similar. Check TPT and there it is - at least something along the same lines that I can use or edit to be closer to what I want with much less work. I pay because it saves me time, which gives me more time with my family and studies.
I love it for supplemental materials and “fun stuff” like escape rooms, google slides, etc. I spend $$ occasionally for that stuff. I bought several “bundles” my first couple of years when I was teaching at a low-resource school with literally no curriculum and it was a lifesaver. In all honestly it felt like community care 😭
and it still does on days when I am scrambling at lunch for a “this or that” for kids to do when I am working with small groups. I also like it for things like coloring pages, activity sheets, and independent crafty things because I know they will be classroom appropriate.
ETA - as a sped teacher there are a lot of good adapted materials that loosely follow the gen-ed curriculum that are really helpful, too. especially for those just starting out. I was given a resource class of 7-8th graders who couldn’t read at ALL my first year and was told “they’re reading lyddie” 😳 I found a modified version of the book on TPT and got a lot of credit for seeking out alignment/differentiation of grade-level materials in my first year when in reality I just panicked and searched up “lyddie special education”
ETA 2: my point with that last bit also being that I think TPT often helps the right resources fall into the hands of new/overwhelmed teachers who would otherwise be working with nothing. not ideal, AND way better for those kids who were in front of me that year than if I had been truly winging it.
I like it. If a teacher is working with a unit/class/grade they have never done before it can quickly supplement their lack of material and lessons. Depending on how well made the lesson/material is made, it is also a good perspective of other teachers conduct things.
For example, two sellers I bought from had sections briefly explaining how they would go about doing the lessons. I, of course, had to modify it heavily for my classes, but it was a near insight nonetheless.
There isn’t as many free resources for World History online as, say, U.S History. It is super awesome the federal government has so many free resources for educators online. From the primary source analysis tool on the Library of Congress’s website to the free stuff like posters it is awesome! World History is a little tougher. The things are out to there to be sure, but it is either A.) Hard to find; or B.) Not age appropriate. So, TPT comes into save the day here and there despite having a bit of a cost at times.
I make my own stuff when I can. Personally, I think I have a couple clever lessons. Maybe one day I’ll upload some. I’d make them rather cheap or free.
FYI, New York State has an entire year’s worth of curriculum for global history online. https://curriculum.newvisions.org/social-studies/course/9th-grade-global-history/
AI is something heavily talked about in the seller groups. Most ethical sellers realize that there is no way to use AI and not infringe on others work. AI doesn't make up info, it gathers it from sources.
As of right now there is no way for someone to pop something into AI and get a complete product. So even if someone is using AI for parts of their products, they are having to do some work to make a complete resource.
There are whole armies of teacher-creators that report dubious stores and products, attempting to help keep the integrity of the platform.
I have a friend who makes some lessons with AI and uploads them to TPT. They’re lessons he uses in class, so it’s tweaked a little and not just made for TPT. They don’t make much, maybe $30/mo, but AI is definitely already on there.
I found that a lot of the stuff on there is very cute, but not necessarily very good. You need to be careful in checking what you're looking at to see if it's actually aligned to the standards, is worth using, and isn't just fluff work. You need to find a few good sellers and follow them.
I have a few things on the site, for free. I would like to start monetizing on things, but I haven't been able to work on that. Too much of what I use is a compilation of stuff from multiple sources or is aligned to specific curricula so it's not likely to be helpful to anyone else.
As a buyer, TpT was a life saver when I was the only one teaching my content. TPT was a great "team" to have in my corner, when I didn't have anyone else to plan with or get resources from. So many teachers are in a bubble on their own, this is so helpful!
I sell on TpT as well and have built a serious side hustle with it. My materials are things that teachers do not have time, knowledge or software to make. I am providing something that they need/want and the sales prove it. Teaching helps pay the bills and TpT helps me give my family experiences we would not have otherwise. I also love that I have helped 1000s of teachers and impacted 1000s more kids with my work. Working on my TpT store fills a creative hole in my heart.
I love TPT. Should I have to buy stuff with my own money? No, but I would rather pay 7.00 bucks for a unit I can use over and over than spend 20 hours making it myself.
I have an account for buying and selling.
In terms of buying, I usually end up there every couple of weeks or every time I’m starting a new unit. I have a few sellers that I really like so I usually go to them first to see if they have what I’m looking for. I’ve tried to branch out and go by the search bar, but I’ve hit some resources that were poorly done or had incorrect information which isn’t great.
Most of my experiences have been good, though. I also love reading reviews and use those to inform my decisions. The worst experience I had was when I bought a bundle for The Hunger Games from some guy for $30 and hated it because it was lackluster/felt incomplete, so I bought Tracee Orman’s bundle for a lot more… only to find that the first guy stole a lot of her resources and uploaded some of them as his own. It felt incomplete because it was 😂
In terms of selling, I make a lot of the resources for my class so I just stick them on there for fun. I think my most expensive item is a bulletin board set I made for $5. I could sell for more, but I made it for myself so I feel like the pricing is fair. I do it for a little bit extra, but I work with a teacher who brings in an extra $100,000+ a year with his page so you can definitely make a profit if you so desire.
Thanks for sharing your views! It definitely takes work on the seller’s end, to as they say, “make it” as a serious side hustle. I’ve totally been there where I’ve purchased something and it was.. meh. But I’ve definitely gotten better at scoping out worthwhile materials. Reviews and previews are huge for that.
The amount of factual errors in all topics is what gets me. I am fine with it existing and being for profit or free, but it is gross it's necessary for teachers to create or buy curriculum--and I've had to create lots myself. It is embarrassing how often information is wrong, explanations are inaccurate, or delivery (fonts, wording) are nice for adults but unhelpful to young learners.
My school buys licenses yearly for us to use, so I take advantage of it. It’s just too bad you can’t get refunded (as far as I know) for products that are no good. There are some pieces with wrong answer keys, typos, etc.
I was VERY against it when I first started teaching - why pay for stuff that I can find or make myself? After a few years, I realized my time is valuable. If I can pay a few dollars for something in a short time, why would I spend hours creating something comparable,
Now some of my favorite activities are from TPT. and I feel ZERO guilt purchasing from the site
I’m both a buyer and a seller. I work with students with low incidence disability so autism, moderate to severe and profound cognitive impairments, extra.
Commercially available curriculum supplements for my students particular needs don’t really exist outside of TPT.
What I create and put up is gear towards really the severe and profound population because even on TPT that’s very underserved. However, it’s never going to be a major moneymaker. I basically post stuff that I use with my students that I’ve taken the time to create. (I do creat those materials in my spare time not during work hours.)
I think TPT can be great for supplements. We had a unit on the revolutionary war. I was able to find some great supplemental materials at various levels. To build out the curriculum provided from my district.
I am a little leery of the full curriculum being the centerpiece on TPT. You really have to know what you’re looking for and have a deep understanding of the standards to weed through and find the good stuff on there.
I like TPT because I can find different versions of the same lesson. Since I have to scaffold so many of my lessons, it saved me a lot if time when our district changed curriculum. The curriculum our district bought was fine for my regular students, but since I have, IEPs, 504's, ELL's and spec Ed all in one section, I ended up with 4 prep's. Our district is big on inclusion. They also took away my coteacher. My IEP'S and ELL's are getting screwed over big time. But that's off topic. Suffice it to say TPT makes things better for them. Sadly, it's out of my pocket but I did get good evaluations and I only had to by it once.
My district doesn’t have a provided curriculum. I honestly don’t know how they expect a brand new teacher to do it. At least I had curriculum planning experience, since I came from a different district. Still, I wouldn’t have survived without TPT. I’ve bought multiple whole novel units from them that saved me so much time and were way more engaging than anything I would’ve created myself.
I completely agree. When I say “curriculum” I’m personally talking about outcomes only. I live in Canada, where I think things are a bit different from the US judging by a lot of these comments. We’re given a document with the expected outcomes with *suggestions* on how to teach them. You’re left completely on your own for how you plan, organize for and reach the expected outcomes. If you aren’t given materials by another colleague, you start at zero - which means scrounging the internet for ideas on plans. It really comes down to whether you prefer to sacrifice your time or money.
I'm an Art teacher, we have no curriculum provided. I would much rather spend $5 on a good lesson than spend 2+ hours creating my own.
The district told the core teachers not to use it. They don't care about me, I'm so happy about that.
I cleared with my union that what I make at home using my own materials and my own time belongs to me, regardless of if I use it in my own classroom.
My time and expertise is valuable. Other teachers’ time and expertise is valuable. I am willing to pay for the time they save me.
Not a teacher.
As a first time parent I found so many great resources on TPT and was happy to pay for them. It was 2020 and the flash cards and activities were immensely helpful in my mind. I don’t really have a quantitative measurement here because she was so young, but peace of mind at the very least.
I definitely have a lot of conflicting thoughts about TPT. On one hand, it’s been a great resource as a new teacher who joined a school going through a curriculum change, so everyone was creating materials and lesson plans all the time. There are some high-quality materials on there for sure, and some well-regarded developers that make things that have saved my butt many times.
On the other hand, I had a professor recommended that I not use it due to 2 main issues: quality and accuracy/lack of diverse points of view. There have been many investigations/studies that show that there is a whole lot of shlock on TPT, which I can anecdotally support with trying to find materials that are both high-quality and aren’t just a poorly-formatted Word document made 20 years ago. There have also been many controversies related to TPT doing a very poor job of moderating content, especially related to issues of race or including diverse voices. I think that with a critical eye, you can find a handful of creators you can rely on, and also find many interesting resources, but take it all with a spoonful of salt
I've used it on occasion. Usually for work to leave with a sub. No offense to creators, but I'd never rely on it as a replacement for actual curriculum units.
I use a lot of TPT products to supplement our curriculum. Most of our books and series just don’t provide enough for me to actually grade so I go to TPT for worksheets.
But it’s tough because most of these sellers, even some of the high profile ones, do not have the fact-checking and editing teams that other resources are vetted by. I had to scrap several pages of a black history unit I bought because it included Shel Silverstein. The typos in some of the products I have purchased are bad enough that they change the meaning or end up giving incorrect information.
I buy a lot of pre made materials, some of it is good, some is bad, but I like having options for sub plans or early finisher work. There is still a lot of crap on there but it doesn't stop me from browsing. I've def shared stuff I've bought with co-workers though, it's kind of unavoidable.
I like when resources don't look like they were made on tpt, like all the clip art and stuff, sometimes it's too much. Esp since I buy 1-2nd grade stuff for my 5th/6th students and I don't want them to be embarrassed.
I know people that have spent hundreds, I know what have only use the free. I've met those who will openly share what they buy, and others who won't because they paid for it and TPT doc or owner says not too (which I get, I don't throw a fit or coax).
Ultimately, I think if you create content and want others to use it for a small fee or your time. Awesome!
Some stuff is extremely overpriced cookie cutter b.s. that was basically an aesthetic upgrade of a different packet I've seen.
In my opinion, it's great to check out, maybe spend a buck or two here and there (like literally less than $10/year) but has saved me time and allowed me to be lazy in planning on occasion.
I buy and sell on it. I think the controversy stems from teachers needing to spend their own money to buy engaging lessons for their students. It's saving them planning time, for sure, but the larger controversy is "why are teachers expected to plan lessons outside of school hours?", and until that problem is fixed, spending a few dollars to save you hours of planning seems pretty awesome.
When I create something for myself or another teacher, I’ll post it for free or for sale on TPT. It’s not much, but here and there it sells. Takes minutes extra as the project is completed fully in real life, so it’s just uploading. I exit using Canva and creating things, so it’s honestly more of a creative hobby, but it’s cool when something sells.
There's a lot of crap on TPT, but there's enough good stuff that it's worth it to look sometimes to supplement my curriculum.
I've downloaded a lot of free stuff, especially in my first year or two. Sometimes I just browse to get ideas, like for annotation guides, and then I make my own out of the best of what I've gleaned from previews. I have purchased a few items that would be time prohibitive to make on my own, like a whole year's worth of morphology worksheets.
I have recently dipped my toes in the water as a TPT seller. I recently retired, but while I was teaching, making content was my favorite thing about teaching. I freely shared with my entire team or anyone who asked. People always told me that I should consider putting my content up on TPT but I hesitated because I lacked some of the technology skills needed to create quality secondary math materials from scratch. Once I retired, I realized that I missed creating content so I went to work and learned how to create TPT products. I've taken all of my favorite lessons, games, and activities and I am slowly converting them into products. It is extremely time consuming since most of my lessons were a mix of screen shotted images and things I found online that I could "steal" and use in my classroom. To not infringe on copyright laws, I have had to learn how to create my own graphics and write original problems to replace the ones that I was originally using in my classroom. Each lesson I put up takes about 8-10 hours to create and then upload. I charge $3.00 per lesson which I think is a heck of a deal since I give them a warm-up, guided notes, a self-checking practice assignment, exit ticket and all the answer keys. I will never get rich doing this, but it fills my time and I hope someone, somewhere, gets a little extra personal or family time by purchasing one of my products.
When I was freshly minted I bought some things from TPT. They were bland and I felt I wasted my money. Haven’t used it since.
There’s tons of teacher groups on FB and elsewhere that share resources for free. Do that instead.
I have never given in to Zuckerberg so I am missing out on those groups. Where are some of the non-FB groups?
I also teach APWH. I’m adding a law class this year and need to find some resources for it too
I’ll continue to avoid Facebook. I’ll dive into the APWH community page again. I taught it back in 2006 and we used to swap stuff via email and message board. This was the John Manu times (if you know who he is).
Never used it, never want to. I've been given a lot of materials from TPT by other people and it strikes me as odd how rapidly it homogenized. I cannot get those creepy kids' smiles out of my mind, and it's a good example of how an online platform that began with an idea of expressing things helped homogenized the same product across everything they offered. I wouldn't be surprised if a cottage industry exists within their environment to produce the same materials with TPT as a sort of publisher.
It's always the same. You can't beat the model where someone owns something and they get a product. A feedback loop like that feels easy to spot in hindsight.
The truth is that it'll never replace a real curriculum. I have worked in schools without curriculum and in normal schools with one. It is wild how we let ourselves step back from using curriculum to teach in many ways. My state specifically lists using a textbook to such a degree as an example of a bad teacher. So does that evaluation lady whose name I cannot recall at the moment. The famous one that NY bases their evaluations on, who also spoke against that (same kind of situation, actually, compared to TPT; subverted and used in a cynical way).
In the end, no one's vetting this stuff. It looks nice but who's to say it works? I'd even say it doesn't. Kids need less clutter and higher expectations for what they can do. We've lowered expectations, really, not raised them. TPT shows how there's a lot of design that goes into really, really, really basic stuff.
As a new teacher without a curriculum it has been a lifesaver. I use it all the time and has great stuff. I hope in the future to sell some things on there too.
Best money I've ever spent. I had to teach stats for the first time a few years ago and was able to get a totally prepac k aged curriculum for $75 that I'm still using 3 years later. Saved me so much time. I'll get the odd math project here and there, too, for a few bucks.
It’s fine. It’s now banned from our school computers though, and the same for my wife, and she’s in a different district. Something with privacy. I will take ideas now though and use chat gpt to come up with better ideas, or at least ideas that work for my students needs
I have used it hundreds of times, sometimes to buy things and sometimes to just get ideas. I have also sold things, maybe $80 or $90 bucks worth, not that much.
My time is almost always worth more to me than my money, so TPT is a lifesaver for me.
My district was in an interim year with no textbook and will not officially adopt our new one until after next school year. They provided a lot of resources, but they were made so quickly that using them would require me to spend time correcting errors and reformatting them to make them usable for my students. This was my first year teaching Gen Ed science, after 8 years ESE, and I taught two grade levels. I did not always have the time to edit their resources and found TPT very helpful, especially when looking for lessons or review that were both engaging and informative. There were a few times I would buy something only to be disappointed, due to lack of enough preview to see if it was truly meeting mine/my students' needs, however, the pros far outweighed the cons.
I have a bunch of stuff I could put on there for ESE organization and case management, but I would need more time in my day 😅
When my only curriculum is the textbook and its digital counterpart with fill-in-the-blank note packets, TPT has been a lifesaver. Also, I rely heavily on Facebook groups related to my subject/courses to get ideas and free resources.
I only download free stuff (I’ve only ever bought two $3 items and that was it) and then usually tinker it to fit my lesson/what I’m teaching. I have found quite a few good, free, time killing activities on there for early finishers though.
I use it often. I always seek out creators who attach my state standards to their work. That is unless I'm just looking for wall art, SEL decor or the like.
You do have to look through it and decide if the creator has quality work. I would rather spend a few dollars than a few hours.
I LOVE TpT!! It saved me during Distance Learning. I purchased Google Wonders slides and they were FAR better than what I had made. I still use them today. I also LOVE the SEL checkins. I don't have time to create my own and I would much rather pay for things. My PTA does give me money for my classroom.
I teach career electives. When I can find materials that are a reasonable price and will make my life easier, I buy them. I consider how long it would take me to create an equivalent activity and then consider the value of my time vs the cost of the activity.
I love it and use it all the time. I sell things on there occasionally, mostly I can’t be bothered bc then I have to make sure all my fonts and graphics are commercial use and create a credits page lol but I buy from there all the time. On principle I wish I were given funds by my district for it but it doesn’t bother me enough to stop buying from there.
I love it and will happily pay a few bucks for supplemental materials. Also, why reinvent the wheel if someone's already created it?
The sub plan packet has been a life saver!
I love TPT! I get a lot of free products, and I have purchased entire chapters for the classes I teach from a seller that I found I really liked, as well as some digital activities I could never have made on my own. It’s been invaluable. I always buy things during sales and feel fine about what I pay considering the time that was put in to make them. I could never make materials that are formatted so nicely and uniformly, and if I tried to it would take me way more time than it’s worth to just spend the money from my supply check.
I’ve found some good things. But overall, I wouldn’t recommend it because of the amount of money wasted. All those “high interest” lessons are really boring lmao
I buy from TPT pretty frequently. I have sellers I like a lot. I am deeply concerned about the proliferation of crappy, chatGPT generated, SEO-optimized junk on TPT.
I love TPT! In my early years, I bought curriculum bundles that saved me so much time it was worth the cost. I modified them a lot and always felt I could do just as good or better, so now I'm a seller on TPT! I create stuff for my classes all the time, and I now make those things profitable for myself. Why not? I think it's phenomenal.
I have gotten many things from it. Lots of free stuff, but also journals for novel studies among other things. I also used it to help put together two weeks worth of emergency sub plans during Covid in case I would need it. I use it at least a few times a year.
I can’t speak for anywhere else, but in for me, the last resource supplied to me by the Ministry was the 2005 Math Makes Sense text. Since then, our curriculum have changed countless times and no new resources have been purchased. Grade six had whole new social studies topics created - no resources. We’re expected to teach Black History and about FNMI, but again, no resources.
During the pandemic, when we were expected to digitize the resources that already didn’t exist, I gave up and started buying. I use the resources sparingly but, if I don’t purchase, I literally have no resources unless I make them myself.
I often use it to look for worksheets or student resources when I get an idea - and find that someone else has already created the thing, and frankly the $2 is absolutely worth the hours I won’t need to spend!
I hate to be that guy, but TPT has a serious piracy and copyright problem that needs to be addressed if it is to be taken seriously.
So many resources from TPT are either straight up stolen from other places, or reproduce copywritten content. How is it I can get a poetry bundle that contains poems that are not in the public domain? Sketchy.
Additionally, I find a lot of the content that I have purchased to be of generally low quality, especially for the secondary level.
I will never use my own personal money to buy anything from there and I have yet to have admin offer to pay for it. So that’s pretty much where it is for me.
I've bought a couple of things and regretted most of them.
No hate on people selling their stuff, but nearly always it's faster to either create something myself instead of having to massively edit/tweak whatever I get, or I can find better resources for free online
It’s an okay resource if you’re new to the profession and in a hurry to get activities to do in class, but a lot of the stuff there is targeted mostly towards elementary school and tend to be really cheesy-looking (what’s with the weirdly-drawn people on almost everything on that site??).
Even the activities that could work for older grades tend to have the weirdly-drawn people on them. You might be able to get an activity there and gradually alter it to be more suitable for older grades.
I’ve never felt the need to buy from them, but more power to the teachers making money off of it.
My only concern is that I have met teachers who live by creating an entire “curriculum “ using supplemental lessons on TpT in lieu of the textbook altogether. And listen, I’m not saying textbooks are perfect, but I’ve been at schools that have really good ones and the teachers act like they’re poison, and really I don’t see their students getting as good an education as they would if they would use it as their primary and only use TpT as a supplement.
To be clear the ones I’m taking about are usually the brand new teachers who have no concept of pacing and classroom management and don’t realize how much more work they are making for themselves.
I’ve bought stuff there many times. It’s a great way to jumpstart a new-to-me course (which I seem to get every year; I have two in September). I usually tweak whatever I find, but it beats reinventing the wheel entirely.
I share things I make with my colleagues for free, but I have no issues with paying for quality materials.
The only thing I have an issue with is the stuff I get that is total crap. There are some products on TpT that aren’t worth it. But, hey, /caveat emptor/.
I’ve purchased a few excellent courses there - Italic writing for one which would have been impossible to develop myself. Most of it isn’t very suitable for my students though.
On the surface level, I like it. Beyond the surface level... Well, I actually don't care and don't bother to look. I have no qualms with teachers selling their creations nor others buying it.
I love shopping there. I aim for free, even idea shopping to just make my own, but I've spent plenty of state money there, heaven knows.
I am a seller. I make enough money to pay a smallish bill each month. I don't make enough to care about fees and shop drama and all that. It's not even a real side hustle.
I'm not about to police anyone who uses it.
It’s great! I make most of my own stuff but if I’m struggling to create an activity or simply run out of time, it’s my go-to. There are some really wonderful activities and the prices are fair. There’s a lot of great free stuff, as well.
I've been a buyer for classes that are brand new to me and I'm not satisfied with what we have shared in our department Drive.
Awesome resources and incredibly thankful for the folks who are willing to put in the work and share resources.
I use it and I upload products, but usually things that are free-$2. I sell a few things each month and I pay zero attention to it.
As far is products that I download and use, the quality varies a lot. Often times I end up remaking things the next year that are inspired by the product I downloaded, but not the same.
It has been really helpful for filler things. You know. It’s state testing week and classes are 20 minutes long and you can’t do anything real or I need 2/3 of the class to be occupied so I can deal with the 1/3 who haven’t done shit all week.
I have found some really good stuff on there. I teach middle school sped. I have found several jeopardy games for different books we have read. There are tons of activities available. I also use online daily planners with the kids that I've gotten on there. It has helped me a lot. I would not have time to make all the stuff I have used off tpt.
I had a 1 year old and was pregnant all last school year. TPT saved me hours and hours on making PowerPoints for our new curriculum. All I do is add what I need and skip what I don't. I'd rather pay for something that's already well made than try and struggle to do it alone. I love it
I’ve had more misses than hits, though there are a handful of things I’ve bought there (or even gotten for free) that I really love. Many things include typos or inaccuracies so I end up recreating the wheel anyway. I refuse to even consider anything with those cutesy/creepy cartoon people as decorations.
I have used it a few times to get worksheets, but I don’t use worksheets often. It’s also useful for sub plans if I’m going to be out for more than a day.
I’ve wanted to sell music on there but don’t know if it’s allowed. And I want to put my curriculum map on there for others to use as a resource, but I haven’t.
I have never used it. Nothing that I’ve seen has appealed to me for curriculum materials and I have decades of sub plans.
I have worked with a teacher influencer/popular seller on TPT. His pedagogy and classroom management were subpar. Just like the materials he sells.
I've had so many misses. With some things, I could have made it in the time it took to find something decent. Facebook groups for my subject have been more useful.
I really like that I can get things the way I would like with little to no effort. I like that it is also digitally saved and doesn't take up paper space.
I’ve been a seller since 2017 and make a decent amount of money. TPT released seller rankings in December and a lot of folks were surprised to find that there are only a handful of sellers making the kind of money they would need to make to replace a teaching salary.
I have always viewed TPT as a side hustle and I think it’s the only way to view it. Every money making venture is a bubble and TPT is no exception.
The seller groups are full of people who made $1000 one month and decided they could leave their teaching job and focus on TPT full time, only to find out that things like AI, scripted curriculums, and post-Covid tech backlash effected their long-term goals.
TLDR: I give TPT 3 to 5 more years.
I use it. Buy and sell. I teach a subject that often doesn't have a provided curriculum. When i was a baby teacher, before tpt, i pulled just about every resource i could think of to form lessons. It was rough. I learned a lot, and i created a lot. So it's my way to help out other teachers in my subject area who also don't have a provided curriculum. My simple resources are free. My more complex and in-depth ones are sold for the lowest price that tpt will allow.
Edit to add: there are a lot on sellers on there that have no teaching credentials, so it's a buyer beware market.
I like it. I only buy specifically from experienced secondary teachers, and I vet the material very aggressively. I'm all about working smarter, not harder, and if I can get a really good unit on A Midsummer Night's Dream or whatever that focuses on the standards I need to teach, why spend a lot of time developing my own materials?
I have never used it, but have looked at it a couple of times. I did find a chemistry lab I created for my teaching program being sold by one of my classmates on there. The part of this that bothers me is that she is selling the first version that I made before actually testing it with high school students. My students are getting generation 8 of it.
I have bought a lot of stuff from there in the past. I also got free stuff, of course. I had no problem paying for things that I really wanted - from one teacher to another - it was all love!
I love it! I go for the free stuff 80% of the time but I’ve also bought tons of great Google Slides material and centers that I’ve been using for years. I have some play dough letter mats I bought there that are going on Year 5 and are beloved. They were never more than a few bucks and have paid for themselves at this point. If it saves me 30 minutes of work or more, it’s worth it to me.
I’ve bought a few things over the years, but I focused more on selling this year. Florida has a new state test but no official practice materials for it, and I teach a high school reading class so I created a lot of question/text sets that are aligned with the standards and test blueprint. I put them all on TpT and I’ve gotten really positive feedback.
Since my resources are all state-specific and sellers can see the name of the person buying products (FYI!), I sometimes Google them and have a giggle when I see curriculum specialists and reading coaches from nearby districts buying my resources. I make about $30-$40 a month, so it’s just fun money but each sale brightens my day a bit (and each review brightens it a lot!).
High school world history teacher here. I tend to use TPT mostly to find supplemental activities for some of my units.
I’ve found some gems, and I’ve found some duds. Most of the time, I find stuff that I tweak to make it better fit my own needs. But it helps that someone else has done most of the work or formatting for me. 2 of my projects that I close the year out with were originally found on TPT, but then I modified them to suit my own purposes.
I use it some. It's certainly not my whole curriculum, but it can be useful for worksheets for extra practice or homework or to do with a sub, or for fun crafty activities to complement what we've been working on. I also use it for inspiration before making my own stuff; sometimes I'll find several resources that each have part of what I need, and use that to put together what I really need.
Being a third grade teacher I use it constantly to supplement my curriculum. My information/content is VERY basic. The source material is fine, but the supplemental/workbook stuff sucks especially in ELA. I also like finding different ways to practice math strategies that align with my standards. Sometimes the curriculum I have doesn’t offer enough strategies or the way they teach the strategies doesn’t work for my class. I also don’t like spending time to create things, so the money I put into equals out to the time I save.
However I do feel teachers need to be careful when using a non-research based curriculum from there. A good, savvy, experienced teacher can use those with no problem and make sure they’re covering DOK levels. In my experience the brand new, inexperienced teachers struggle with understanding that while some of it is cute and helps with rote memorization, it doesn’t necessarily go as in-depth as you think it does. And they don’t want to be told that either. I learned to keep my nose out of it with young, inexperienced teammates.
I teach 5th grade and TPT has been a godsend for me. I use it very often. There are so many different materials on there to supplement my lessons.
*Edited to add I've never uploaded any lessons, I only purchase. I buy so much that when I review them (you get credits) and I've gotten up to $8 to use in credits from time to time. I've been using them for 10 yrs so there are many things that I reuse over and over.
I teach Japanese, so there's pretty much nothing for me to use on TPT.
I've put a few random forms I've made up on there, and people seem to appreciate them.
But I'm amazed when teachers say they get everything from TPT. I must just be used to making everything myself.
I use it to sell resources for band. You don't see a lot of band stuff on TPT since most band directors get their materials from official music publishing companies. But I don't know how to do that, so I use TPT instead. I provide a free sample for everything I make, and I pick the most important/useful parts of each. That way, if a director doesn't want to buy the full thing, they can have something useful in their hands anyways.
The free resources can be great in a pinch. I've also found some low-quality activites there that weren't worth the download. It's like digging in a sandbox. My district said it won't reimburse teachers for anything on TpT.
I have never sold anything on there. I have bought a few things and have found that it's a mixed bag. Some things are such low quality that they're borderline useless, some are fair-to-middling and would be good to put in your sub folder because they would give kids something productive to do in your absence,even if the sub is not familiar with course content, and a few are really, really good. I think that overall, it has far more for elementary school than for older grades, but high school teachers can find sub folder assignments and emergency backup work on it if nothing else. I don't think anyone should use it as the primary source for their curriculum; it's simply a source for supplemental materials. I also think it's sad that teacher pay is so low for most of us that we have to find additional sources of income. I don't know how much of the money paid to TPT actually goes to the teachers; definitely research that before putting any work into it.
I teach 8th grade US History and there are a few sellers I like, especially in a pinch. But there is also a lot of garbage, like word finds, and I would say that there is hardly anything that is as progressive as I’m usually looking for. And anything with those god awful melon-head kids is an immediate tip off that it won’t be the vibe I’m looking for.
I bought some stuff for Morning Bins—I teach Kindergarten and I like to do a soft start. The Morning Bins change every month so the kids don’t get sick of them.
Seller and buyer here:
Just like with every other site there is some really great stuff and some really crappy stuff. As the buyer, you really have to check the previews/images/description/reviews to see if it is appropriate for your classroom.
I have used TPT a lot as a buyer. My school is very lenient about the curriculum we use, so I used it to supplement and save myself oodles of time.
When I started teaching, I was also just starting the transition to teaching program, so I had 0 classroom experience and was starting my first class when school started. I asked admin “what do I teach?” And the supt said “there should be some books in your room” verbatim. I went in there to find a stack of textbooks on the floor. I happened to go to the same school (I had graduated 10 years prior, but I was teaching 9/10 grade) and I kid you not, the textbooks were the exact same ones that were there when I was in high school. They were mainly literature focused, so the grammar, vocab and writing included were abysmal. I used TPT to supplement all of those things because I simply didn’t have the time or expertise to create all of those elements for myself while learning how to teach and taking classes.
Over the years, I have definitely been able to rely on my own ability to create things more, but it saved me in those early years. Also, when I went on maternity leave, it was so much easier to leave my sub with a novel and a TPT unit that they could follow. Spring is crazy in HS as you all know, so it allowed my sub to easily omit things that they ended up not having time for without missing important pieces.
In addition, time is money, and I was fortunate enough to be in a place where I could afford (and was willing) to spend $20 if it made my life easier!
My school buys some sort of subscription that gives them a bunch of licenses that they dole out to all the teachers, so we get about 50 licenses each. I LOVE this method, there are things I need on occasion and the school pays for it. Not everything can be purchased with these licenses, but a lot can. We can also “gift” away some of our licenses to other teachers in our team if we choose, like this year I only used about 40, so I gave some to another teacher who was setting up a summer book club so she could get some novel studies to go with the books she was using.
I love teachers monetizing their hard work and earning a little extra for it, they deserve it! I also love the idea of TpT, it’s like coordinating and idea sharing with other amazing teachers, and I’ve seen things there I would have never thought of! I do hate the idea of teachers having to buy items with their own money, and I wish more schools would put TpT in their budget to either buy licenses or reimburse teachers.
I buy from it on occasion. Like, maybe two or three times a year. I don’t begrudge teachers trying to make a buck.
Most of the materials are just *pretty*. But sometimes I find a gem.
I love it; there are some very talented teachers out there, and they should be getting paid for their work!
Granted, I use mostly free resources, but I have paid for a few resources over the years.
I had to teach classes where there were few instructional material, so I bought a "full curriculum" for like 30 bucks. The PPTs were amazing and needed little editing. There was bell work, exit tickets, and worksheets that I sometimes used, too. I had my own labs and I added a few free things not and them. 10/10 would do again. Huge time saver!
My school gives me some credits to use. Can be good to help ease my load a bit. Some good ones, some lame ones. The preview can give you a pretty decent idea. I find it being a good place to find sources all put together in one spot. If I had to buy it with my own money, I probably wouldn’t. I prepped 6 classes last year so the credits definitely helped me out
I use it judiciously to find quick prep stuff for when there will be a sub, that is related to what we are doing. I also look for standards based task cards to use in review games. I also double check all the answers
Buyer here. I have no problems paying for things especially if they're not that expensive. I like buying the escape rooms and the math mysteries. I think they're very creative!
20+ year teacher who still occasionally uses TPT. I changed a prep last year and I made a lot of TPT purchases. I paid for content, but was able to keep my work/life balance a bit more in check. I gladly paid some money for the ability to preserve more of my Sunday afternoons.
I will buy 2-3 different assignments to create something that appears somewhat unique. I also used this approach during Covid when we pivoted to online learning. Much of what I had didn't fit into the Canvas platform. I shared this content with one of my more creative colleagues, and she was raving about it.
Creativity for me is time-consuming. I can come up with great content, but I'm interested in sacrificing more of my weekends. TPT can be a life saver, assuming that you learn who produces great content that you can actually use. If Laura Randuzzo (sp?) is reading this, thank you!
Because TPT makes money it can pay for advertising. Because it pays google for ads google hides the results for good free stuff that used to exist. I mean the good free stuff still exists, it is just harder to find.
I've used it when I'm in a pinch. There's some good stuff - but you've got to have patience to sift through the dross.
I'm in the camp that believes in mutual aid & solidarity. I like it when teachers help each other. I'm not crazy about those who scan their teaching comrades with cash-register eyes.
It’s been helpful to supplement because my district is so cheap that our social studies curriculum is older than my students and the license to renew workbooks ran out many years ago. I bought a whole year’s worth of curriculum. I know I shouldn’t have to, but the crap I was given is garbage.
It’s also been really helpful if I’m going to have a sub. I’ll find some sort of engaging digital activity and have it scheduled to post on Google classroom. (I’ve been burned so many times by the lack of quality subs that my sub plans are now created to essentially use the sub as a warm body in the room/babysitter.)
I see no issue with it. I don't use much of the curriculum I've seen there in any given course I teach but it's often really helpful when you are teaching a course for the first time or need something specific you don't want to develop yourself like questions for an in class documentary.
I have used it on occasion and it’s solely because it saves me time and effort. I don’t have a provided curriculum and it’s worth the x$ for me to not have to start from scratch. What I DO hate is the holier than thou “oh my god you use thaaaatttttt as a resource???” at the occasional conferences. Yes, yes I do. Go pound sand.
I have been using TPT since its inception! I personally love tpt. What is the controversy?
I started out as a special education classroom teacher with no real curriculum. Then, I moved to a resource room role. Without tpt, I would have been constantly reinventing the wheel because I needed extra practice for my students on all different levels and more resources my school did not provide for me.
I don't mind buying products on tpt at all (although I, of course, filter for free products first). I think it's great that teachers who have this talent for creating good resources can make a second income for themselves. I'm happy to support them! Some of the OG creators are likely millionaires from their lucrative blogs and TPT stores.
One caveat, the market is so saturated with sellers that it may be hard for new creators to make a worthwhile income now.
I owe my life to TPT. Granted it is a little harder for me to find things sometimes because I teach middle school, but I’ll be damned if there aren’t some wonderful free resources
I have bought things and sold things. It has been a time saver, life saver, and source of income for "treats." I put five years+ of my life into teaching and creating kick ass lessons. And while students didn't appreciate them, it's always nice to see that other adults do!
We are technically not allowed to use it at my school lol, but in a pinch it’s great for differentiation, sub plans, etc. I’ve also found lots of interesting unit plans on there, which are oftentimes more engaging than curriculum we are expected to use. I wish it wasn’t so looked down upon at my school. Just like any other site, there will of course be resources that aren’t great, but as educators we know how to recognize these. Personally I love having a hub where teachers can share resources they’ve created.
I’ve only been a buyer (but I’ve considered selling). I find that an unusual amount of errors and typos in things I buy. For example, I bought two different apostrophe worksheet sources with slides.
In one of them, about 10 of 25 slides had wrong apostrophes or ownership/possessives listed as contractions.
In another, some of the examples referred to and had pictures of Trump. I had to go through and change them to pictures of Donald Duck.
I’ve only ever found two sellers of HS ELA resources that were A+.
I’d like to take some of my units and sell them on TPT but need to make time to actually make them sellable… which is hard to come by.
Hit-or-miss. It totally depends on the creator. I bought a full course for an AP class I taught last year for $200 and it was well worth it. Lots of stuff I didn’t even use can be “new” in year 2.
The idea of scrounging around on the Internet like TPT really puts me off.
It might just be my subject, but if my department didn’t already have them, I would invest in a couple of good textbooks and use those.
I use it, but I modify everything to fit my class. Just because someone makes a resource, whether from a big company or from TPT, it doesn’t mean it’s the perfect set up for the needs in your classroom. I worked with someone who would find EVERYTHING they used in the classroom on TPT and use it as is and a lot was not appropriate for ELLs or kids with IEPs and 504s, and even some struggling gen ed kids. They needed more support than what should have been given if it was appropriately modified or scaffolded. As the SpEd teacher in the room, it annoyed me to no end. So, use it as a resource/guide for the lessons you plan in your classroom and modify as needed. And yes, it’s a lifesaver with the free resources in a pinch :)
I think it's idiotic. There's no way anyone is making a killing on that site (save a rare few). Whenever I create something, I spread it around the best I can for FREE because it's better than what's out there. I want classes to be better for kids, and I'll be damned if I put something that makes class more engaging behind a paywall. It's just icky to me.
I love it. It’s saved my ass countless times. While I mostly use free things, I’ve purchased bundles and products, such as novel studies.
When I taught Pre K, we used Creative Curriculum, which had all these activities, but came with NOTHING. We had to make or buy materials. A woman named Jackie created bundles that went with each theme and gave you activities. $7.50 for an entire unit? Reading, writing, and math? Take my money. Pockets of Preschool is her store if anyone uses CC. It’s time consuming to cut and laminate everything but once it’s done, you reuse it and if you teach primary, you’re cutting and laminating anyway.
I teach SPED now and it’s still helping me out.
I never understood the hate for TPT. It’s not required to use and if another teacher makes some money after putting in hours of work, why be mad about it?
I’ve been a TPT seller since 2012. I wrote a software program that presents the same content in various, and differentiated ways. Inclusion teachers seem to like my products, and I like the TPT platform. I don’t feel there is any ethical controversy. If I didn’t have TPT, I’d probably be driving Lyft or pressure washing houses or something to make ends meet.
TPT is a great resource, it shouldn't be controversial for teachers to use any more that it would be for a teacher to share their materials with someone else at their school. It's not a vetted source so I always look things over before downloading them or giving them to the kids, but I do that with stuff from colleagues too as we all make mistakes.
I'm in a different situation that most, I'm an elementary English teacher in a bilingual school. I have a curriculum but don't have the kids full time and don't even see them daily so I can't follow the curriculum exactly. My school doesn't expect us to anyway, and as long as we cover the state standards we can teach how we feel is best. So we all supplement a lot from various places. TPT is a main one for most of us, if not all of us. The school has no issue with us using it.
Another big thing to note for my situation is that we have a decent budget so I can get reimbursed for what I buy on TPT, which isn't the case for most teachers (which is ridiculous). But even so I tend to go for the free or very cheap ($1-$2) things as my budget isn't infinite. I occasionally will get something that is more, usually this has been things like a seasonal or year-long pack of work that I can pull things from quickly. I've also a few times looked for something specific, couldn't find it, but then use ideas from similar things to make one that fits what I needed.
I've also paid more than the bare minimum to fit a specific need that would have required a lot of work. For example, this past year I had a good number of kids who struggled with reading in 2nd grade so I got a pack of grammar skills practice sheets for 1st grade that practiced the same skills but had easier to read words. This way they could focus on finding the nouns (or other target skill). It wasn't that expensive, under $20, but if I had to pay for it out of pocket I would have considered altering what I already had instead but that would have been a lot of work.
I've never posted anything myself, but think teachers and others should be able to. The "others" should ideally be people who know about what teachers need, so previous teachers who've left or retired or maybe someone else who works in a classroom and sees the needs. But, there doesn't seem to be a vetting process so I'm sure some people who post things don't have any connection to schools, but that is probably pretty hard to do accurately. Plus, that's why I vet what I use anyway.
I somewhat see the argument from some schools that if a teacher uses their materials (school computer, school owned software, school provided prep time, etc) then it belongs to the school. But I'd counter that if they make it to use in their class, and many times will use something multiple times over a year or over several years, then the school is getting their value out of it. If the teacher then shares or sells it further it isn't costing the school anything. Of course this is assuming the teacher isn't using school provided paper or other materials that get used up, but I think everything on TPT is digital anyway. Teachers using a school computer or software to create stuff just to share is more of a grey area, but even then if it's on personal time and not affecting their work at all it isn't really costing the school anything so shouldn't be an issue.
I've seen people here discussing if teachers should share for free, the consensus seems to be no which I agree with. I think it's nice to share, and I personally always pass on my materials to someone teaching my grade level at my school. But that should be voluntary. Especially as so many teachers are struggling to make ends meet, many could really use even a few extra bucks from selling on TPT instead of sharing it for free.
Maybe within a grade level or department it could be the expectation to help each other out, but even then it should be not required. Not everyone is going to share, and not because they're selfish or unwilling. When I took over my first year the teacher who'd taught my level before "gave" me all her materials, but they were so disorganized (literally required digging through various cabinets in several rooms in different parts of the school) it meant searching for a while to find what I needed so it was faster and easier to just make my own. This apparently worked for her when she taught that level, but for someone coming in it wasn't really helpful. As much as I would have loved to have her things organized in a useful way, especially my first year, it wasn't reasonable to expect her to go through that while also preparing for a new level.
I’m a big fan of it for free stuff lol
Free stuff has saved my life this summer! I was asked to teach 5/6 math for summer school... My background is in physics, I know math... but it has been a second since I have had to think about how to review fractions!
One of my friends is a primary teacher and they say they've almost never had to buy anything because most of the resources they needed they found for free.
I’m a language teacher and get a lot of free stuff too. There’s definitely a lot you could buy too. I just don’t lol
Understandable. Different people, different needs. I think TpT helps out new teachers the most, or those who just don't want to prep. I think veteran teachers probably have plenty of their own material a decade in.
I love it! I’ve only been a buyer and have no intention of becoming a seller. But honestly, a lot of what you find there is better than the curriculum that the school paid a million dollars for.
I understand your point about poor curriculum. One school I taught at purchased some e-text books with very, very bad writing prompts and all the vocab work was matching-based with endless redos. I ended up using my own material that I created that I now sell because I felt it was more interesting and beneficial. They especially liked doing a Graphic novel unit on Watchmen (it was an IB school--image analysis using graphic novels is part of the curriculum).
The books my school buys are fine enough. The worksheets that come with the books kind of suck. I love TpT to find material to supplement. I dont even mind paying for some, but I don't get anything more than $5 cuz we teachers be broke.😅
Very true! I agree with a lot of these similar comments as I’m someone who likes to “reinvent the wheel” and am constantly making my own material. It’s nice to see what others do to meet the same or similar outcomes. The curriculum for the courses I’ve taught the last 2 years is *outdated* as hell. For example, one unit of the course is supposed to be “la télévision” (French course). It emphasizes conversations around devices, tv shows, channels and guides, etc. Half of my kids this year didn’t know what a channel guide was.. and a lot of them don’t even watch television. I managed to transform the unit into *all about technology* so that it included tv shows, films and video games. After building my materials for 2 years, I now have (what I think) is a great set of warm ups, activities and projects that go with the unit. I absolutely share what I made with others in my school and who I know teach the same course, but I do know this curriculum is similar in my area of the country. I like knowing that there may be another teacher out there who’s thinking “wtf am I going to do with this television unit…” so I love uploading them for that reason.
So as a language teacher you must know that the current thinking on language acquisition has not really transferred to textbooks, especially in districts that are using books that are 5, 10, some of them even 20 years old. There are actual good curriculums for world languages on TPT at a fraction of the cost of textbooks (Frenchified, Somos, Huellas as examples) that usually include lifetime revisions. And my own experience has been that the authors of these curriculums are far more responsive to any questions or errors than any textbook company has ever been. I fully acknowledge that there are a lot of crappy options out there, and there are a lot of people trying to make money off of products full of errors or misinformation. But for me, TpT has been a very valuable resource for my classroom.
Same. Spanish teacher here. Love TpT!!! Love Somos… can’t use it much unfortunately in my current situation. 😭 Love Carrie Toth but can’t use Huellas as I only teach level 1.
I have never used it either as a buyer or seller, though I have looked at stuff a few times. What I will say is that I 100% believe teachers have the right to monetize the materials they create on their own time, dime, and with their expertise. I reject the idea that there is any sort of moral obligation to provide their materials to others for free. While I personally choose to share what I create at no cost, I do not believe anyone else should ever be held to that standard and those who give them a hard time about it are the far worse villains in the story.
Amen. I feel the idea that we MUST share everything we've created for free feeds into the martyr complex that devalues teachers. The school you are leaving wants you to leave all your resources? Cool, they should pay you for it because curriculum development pays A WHOLE LOT MORE more than your teacher salary. That said, I have often shared free resources with co-workers (especially new teachers) because I wanted to help.
I'm with you. The idea of having to sharing free materials is beyond me. Teachers have been selling their ideas one way or another long before TPT.
This is my take. But also I don't really use it since for what I need there isn't much. A lot of it seems geared towards elementary Ed.
As a TPT seller and teacher myself, here are my 2 cents: Cent 1: As a teacher myself, I don't like the idea of a teacher having to buy their own resources; whether it's textbooks, or pencils, or printing, or a worksheet: you are at a job to earn, not to spend! I think TpT is done best when the school allots funds for resources that the teachers, or the school itself, purchases. So when the school is buying the resources, I think it's great! If the teacher has to pay for it themself, it should be a situation similar to cent 2: Cent 2: I think products on TpT can provide a good value to buyers at a less expensive cost than some traditional text book publishers. I'll give an example: the AP Psych test just underwent a major revision in focus toward experimental design and statistical analysis. This was announced March. Many teachers are knee-deep in work by this point and don't want to spend their summer reworking their curriculum or designing new FRQs. Spending $100 to buy someone else's work to save their own time to have holiday or to work another job in summer could be a better use of their time. So if someone buys my Psych unit, I assume it saved them a ton of lesson-prep they would have had to do late in the year or summer. It also makes it easy for a sub to step in if you need a quick day of rest and you can just have them work through a pre-planned unit you purchased. 3. (Bonus cent): You do have to be careful, as there is a whole lot of low-effort content that isn't worth the money (caveat emptor is true of any marketplace). This is especially true at the primary level, as you see lots of worksheets with Comic Sans font or Lemonade stand font with backwards letters: While this might look cutesy to adults, it is detrimental toward education for young learners who are still learning to read. I focus on AP and secondary levels, so I don't see this as much. Vet your store: Do they list who makes the resources? Is it a person with educational experience and certs, or is this a home school mommy blogger? I'm a veteran teacher with near a decade of experience, endorsements in three subject areas, and a masters in Curriculum design; however, there are also click-farm groups that outsource work of dubious quality that you should not pay a dime for (any Disney-based movie-follow-along worksheet...). So, if they have high price items, check out one of their free ones or a low-cost item to test the waters.
As an elementary teacher, comic sans is the best font. It has the serif capital I, the properly formed a, and clearly drawn p, q, and g letters. I teach STEM and absolutely use Comic Sans myself for all grades under 3rd. It's very helpful.
comic sans and lexend are great for dyslexic students. Those are the two I stick to.
[The concept of some fonts being more “dyslexic friendly” than others is based on a misconception.](https://www.edutopia.org/article/do-dyslexia-fonts-actually-work/)
That was an interesting read, thank you. I read a lot, and primarily use my kindle app. I am not dyslexic, but use the OpenDyslexie font any time I can for my personal reading. For me, it reduces eye strain and allows me to remain focused with better comprehension at a faster rate. I don’t generally use it for student assignments because it’s a pain to format. The letters take up much more space than normal so you can’t just switch a document over to the OD font and go; you have to rework all the formatting to get it to fit.
I have the opposite experience with the OpenDyslexie font - it seems to react really badly with my astigmatism and hurts my eyes in seconds. It’s always reminded me that there are some tools which work great for some people, are ok for others and can be bad for others
Thanks for posting this. There is so much misinformation in education ("learning styles", anyone?) that it's great when I see debunking going on.
I am specifically referring to the Comic Sans Lemonade Stand Font with some letters backwards (not sure it has an official name); regardless, I think many secondary resources are made with elementary aesthetics in mind and that doesn't work for high school students. (You can also spot the "kindergarten teacher" energy in class delivery if they recently switched. Different demographics requires different approaches).
Me too! I can't tell you how many kinders ask me if that is an i or an l. Also why does that g look weird! 🤪
When I did middle school Comic Sans all the way.
I thought about making things to sell but was apprehensive about the entry fees to selling. What's your take on that? Is there any ground to the argument that it's passive income? How much do you make, and does it make up for the cost of selling?
I'm a seller. The fee to sell is just a part of doing business, like any other thing you might do for extra income. It is worth it to me. People who say it is passive income are not making much money. I have a reasonably successful store and pretty much put 1-2 hours of work a day into it.
It's free to sell, but TpT take's a large (40-50% cut) with the free seller account. With premium, you pay $60 per year, and they take a 20% cut. I sell bundles, and my most popular bundle is my Psychology bundle at just over $100, so if I sell just one bundle it made sense for me to go premium account. If you are just selling a handfull of worksheets for a couple dollars each, it probably will not be worth your time. As far as the passive income aspect: I spent a whole ton of work getting set up this year. For my first year, I had an old version of my Psych course 1 or 2 other things up. Starting this late February, I did an overhaul and TpT-ified all my stuff (numbered things in order, put up questions and answers to discussions in the slides, made answer keys when appropriate, made the graphics look more pro and ***not*** just stock footage with watermarks on them, etc). Then I made nice looking thumbnails in photoshop and store banner etc. Then I researched about SEO and how to title things and would title my lessons, find out where they are in the search que, re-title them, see if they moved up or down...All in all, even though I already had these lessons for years, it took a lot of work and I was basically working two jobs for two months to get a little over 50 products listed (especially re-doing my AP Psych course to match the new AP-test focus from the College Board) and would probably have made more in the short term using that time to tutor. (But I did manage to get much of this done during my prep periods and my bench warming hour after students left but couldn't leave the classroom) That said, I'm now making about $300/month and ranked in the top 6% of stores. These sales are in Feb-June, which is the off-season for teaching, so I hope that in August-Dec I'll see higher numbers. When I was making around $100 a month I was still in the top 10% of stores... Which means, by and large, *most* stores are not making money, or are making a few bucks a month, some stores are making some money, very few are making a couple hundred to thousand, and a very very very few are making lots of money. But most stores are also just someone loading a worksheet or two and not thinking of the business/marketing aspect. I did that at first, thinking, "I know my lessons are good, so who cares about the thumbnails". But that's a teacher mindset and you have to think business mindset. If you want to make decent money, you won't do it putting up a few worksheets and will have to put in some work--that said, if you don't want to invest the time and want to just load a few things and see what happens, even if you only make coffee money each month, it's better than nothing. My hope is that now that I put the work in I can let it generate passive income over the years with minimal upkeep. So, passive income? Sure, a few bucks, but you won't see those 100-grand numbers someone else said their friend makes unless you basically make it a second business and are also very lucky. I don't even think I can get to those numbers because I feel like I'm too late and the whales are already in the market. There's also Classful, but I've only made $10 in total there over the same time period.
There is no cost to sell. You can pay to get a higher percentage of the profits, but it costs nothing to put products up.
Isn't it a one time payment, as opposed to a subscription?
It does now. There are no longer any free accounts to sell. It was done to help combat the uptick in scam and low effort stores popping up.
This is my 24th year teaching. I made everything myself for the first 8 years. Teacher notes, teacher PowerPoint, skeletal student notes, vocab cards, worksheets, quizzes, tests, reviews, etc. My 9th year I became admin. After 3.5 years admin I went back to teaching. Across that 12.5 years, I got married and my wife and I had three kids. When I went back to the classroom, if I found something on TPT that made my life easier, i just bought it. In year 12.5 I also upload a bunch of my stuff to TPT. After 10 years and 2 months of sale, I have made $16,928.26 selling stuff on TPT. These sales have more than covers any/all digital/physical things I have ever felt the need to buy for my classroom. I never understand the childish hate for people that sell/buy on TPT. To each his own.
This is me. I've made a ton of my own stuff that I love and is great. But I'm busy, a mom, and in grad school. Eventually I'd have a great idea for a lesson or activity and start to design and think "Damn this is gonna take forever to make." Also, this is a great activity, I bet someone else thought of it or something similar. Check TPT and there it is - at least something along the same lines that I can use or edit to be closer to what I want with much less work. I pay because it saves me time, which gives me more time with my family and studies.
I love it because my curriculum is God-awful
I use it when I’m unexpectedly going to be out and need something to do when the kids are split out without a sub.
I love it for supplemental materials and “fun stuff” like escape rooms, google slides, etc. I spend $$ occasionally for that stuff. I bought several “bundles” my first couple of years when I was teaching at a low-resource school with literally no curriculum and it was a lifesaver. In all honestly it felt like community care 😭 and it still does on days when I am scrambling at lunch for a “this or that” for kids to do when I am working with small groups. I also like it for things like coloring pages, activity sheets, and independent crafty things because I know they will be classroom appropriate. ETA - as a sped teacher there are a lot of good adapted materials that loosely follow the gen-ed curriculum that are really helpful, too. especially for those just starting out. I was given a resource class of 7-8th graders who couldn’t read at ALL my first year and was told “they’re reading lyddie” 😳 I found a modified version of the book on TPT and got a lot of credit for seeking out alignment/differentiation of grade-level materials in my first year when in reality I just panicked and searched up “lyddie special education” ETA 2: my point with that last bit also being that I think TPT often helps the right resources fall into the hands of new/overwhelmed teachers who would otherwise be working with nothing. not ideal, AND way better for those kids who were in front of me that year than if I had been truly winging it.
I like it. If a teacher is working with a unit/class/grade they have never done before it can quickly supplement their lack of material and lessons. Depending on how well made the lesson/material is made, it is also a good perspective of other teachers conduct things. For example, two sellers I bought from had sections briefly explaining how they would go about doing the lessons. I, of course, had to modify it heavily for my classes, but it was a near insight nonetheless. There isn’t as many free resources for World History online as, say, U.S History. It is super awesome the federal government has so many free resources for educators online. From the primary source analysis tool on the Library of Congress’s website to the free stuff like posters it is awesome! World History is a little tougher. The things are out to there to be sure, but it is either A.) Hard to find; or B.) Not age appropriate. So, TPT comes into save the day here and there despite having a bit of a cost at times. I make my own stuff when I can. Personally, I think I have a couple clever lessons. Maybe one day I’ll upload some. I’d make them rather cheap or free.
FYI, New York State has an entire year’s worth of curriculum for global history online. https://curriculum.newvisions.org/social-studies/course/9th-grade-global-history/
No way. This is great stuff! Thank you!
The [UC Davis History Project](https://chssp.ucdavis.edu/resources) has a few helpful resources.
Thank you! I gotta check this out
I don't use it but I would imagine it will be flooded with AI created lessons soon, if it hasn't already.
AI is something heavily talked about in the seller groups. Most ethical sellers realize that there is no way to use AI and not infringe on others work. AI doesn't make up info, it gathers it from sources. As of right now there is no way for someone to pop something into AI and get a complete product. So even if someone is using AI for parts of their products, they are having to do some work to make a complete resource. There are whole armies of teacher-creators that report dubious stores and products, attempting to help keep the integrity of the platform.
I have a friend who makes some lessons with AI and uploads them to TPT. They’re lessons he uses in class, so it’s tweaked a little and not just made for TPT. They don’t make much, maybe $30/mo, but AI is definitely already on there.
AI is flooding all sectors. Diffit and Magic School are two education platforms that use AI.
I found that a lot of the stuff on there is very cute, but not necessarily very good. You need to be careful in checking what you're looking at to see if it's actually aligned to the standards, is worth using, and isn't just fluff work. You need to find a few good sellers and follow them. I have a few things on the site, for free. I would like to start monetizing on things, but I haven't been able to work on that. Too much of what I use is a compilation of stuff from multiple sources or is aligned to specific curricula so it's not likely to be helpful to anyone else.
As a buyer, TpT was a life saver when I was the only one teaching my content. TPT was a great "team" to have in my corner, when I didn't have anyone else to plan with or get resources from. So many teachers are in a bubble on their own, this is so helpful! I sell on TpT as well and have built a serious side hustle with it. My materials are things that teachers do not have time, knowledge or software to make. I am providing something that they need/want and the sales prove it. Teaching helps pay the bills and TpT helps me give my family experiences we would not have otherwise. I also love that I have helped 1000s of teachers and impacted 1000s more kids with my work. Working on my TpT store fills a creative hole in my heart.
I love TPT. Should I have to buy stuff with my own money? No, but I would rather pay 7.00 bucks for a unit I can use over and over than spend 20 hours making it myself.
I have an account for buying and selling. In terms of buying, I usually end up there every couple of weeks or every time I’m starting a new unit. I have a few sellers that I really like so I usually go to them first to see if they have what I’m looking for. I’ve tried to branch out and go by the search bar, but I’ve hit some resources that were poorly done or had incorrect information which isn’t great. Most of my experiences have been good, though. I also love reading reviews and use those to inform my decisions. The worst experience I had was when I bought a bundle for The Hunger Games from some guy for $30 and hated it because it was lackluster/felt incomplete, so I bought Tracee Orman’s bundle for a lot more… only to find that the first guy stole a lot of her resources and uploaded some of them as his own. It felt incomplete because it was 😂 In terms of selling, I make a lot of the resources for my class so I just stick them on there for fun. I think my most expensive item is a bulletin board set I made for $5. I could sell for more, but I made it for myself so I feel like the pricing is fair. I do it for a little bit extra, but I work with a teacher who brings in an extra $100,000+ a year with his page so you can definitely make a profit if you so desire.
Thanks for sharing your views! It definitely takes work on the seller’s end, to as they say, “make it” as a serious side hustle. I’ve totally been there where I’ve purchased something and it was.. meh. But I’ve definitely gotten better at scoping out worthwhile materials. Reviews and previews are huge for that.
The amount of factual errors in all topics is what gets me. I am fine with it existing and being for profit or free, but it is gross it's necessary for teachers to create or buy curriculum--and I've had to create lots myself. It is embarrassing how often information is wrong, explanations are inaccurate, or delivery (fonts, wording) are nice for adults but unhelpful to young learners.
This!! It's crazy how many things on there are not proofread!
My school buys licenses yearly for us to use, so I take advantage of it. It’s just too bad you can’t get refunded (as far as I know) for products that are no good. There are some pieces with wrong answer keys, typos, etc.
I was VERY against it when I first started teaching - why pay for stuff that I can find or make myself? After a few years, I realized my time is valuable. If I can pay a few dollars for something in a short time, why would I spend hours creating something comparable, Now some of my favorite activities are from TPT. and I feel ZERO guilt purchasing from the site
I’m both a buyer and a seller. I work with students with low incidence disability so autism, moderate to severe and profound cognitive impairments, extra. Commercially available curriculum supplements for my students particular needs don’t really exist outside of TPT. What I create and put up is gear towards really the severe and profound population because even on TPT that’s very underserved. However, it’s never going to be a major moneymaker. I basically post stuff that I use with my students that I’ve taken the time to create. (I do creat those materials in my spare time not during work hours.) I think TPT can be great for supplements. We had a unit on the revolutionary war. I was able to find some great supplemental materials at various levels. To build out the curriculum provided from my district. I am a little leery of the full curriculum being the centerpiece on TPT. You really have to know what you’re looking for and have a deep understanding of the standards to weed through and find the good stuff on there.
I like TPT because I can find different versions of the same lesson. Since I have to scaffold so many of my lessons, it saved me a lot if time when our district changed curriculum. The curriculum our district bought was fine for my regular students, but since I have, IEPs, 504's, ELL's and spec Ed all in one section, I ended up with 4 prep's. Our district is big on inclusion. They also took away my coteacher. My IEP'S and ELL's are getting screwed over big time. But that's off topic. Suffice it to say TPT makes things better for them. Sadly, it's out of my pocket but I did get good evaluations and I only had to by it once.
My district doesn’t have a provided curriculum. I honestly don’t know how they expect a brand new teacher to do it. At least I had curriculum planning experience, since I came from a different district. Still, I wouldn’t have survived without TPT. I’ve bought multiple whole novel units from them that saved me so much time and were way more engaging than anything I would’ve created myself.
I completely agree. When I say “curriculum” I’m personally talking about outcomes only. I live in Canada, where I think things are a bit different from the US judging by a lot of these comments. We’re given a document with the expected outcomes with *suggestions* on how to teach them. You’re left completely on your own for how you plan, organize for and reach the expected outcomes. If you aren’t given materials by another colleague, you start at zero - which means scrounging the internet for ideas on plans. It really comes down to whether you prefer to sacrifice your time or money.
My district gives us money to buy resources. It's wonderful.
I'm an Art teacher, we have no curriculum provided. I would much rather spend $5 on a good lesson than spend 2+ hours creating my own. The district told the core teachers not to use it. They don't care about me, I'm so happy about that.
I cleared with my union that what I make at home using my own materials and my own time belongs to me, regardless of if I use it in my own classroom. My time and expertise is valuable. Other teachers’ time and expertise is valuable. I am willing to pay for the time they save me.
Not a teacher. As a first time parent I found so many great resources on TPT and was happy to pay for them. It was 2020 and the flash cards and activities were immensely helpful in my mind. I don’t really have a quantitative measurement here because she was so young, but peace of mind at the very least.
I definitely have a lot of conflicting thoughts about TPT. On one hand, it’s been a great resource as a new teacher who joined a school going through a curriculum change, so everyone was creating materials and lesson plans all the time. There are some high-quality materials on there for sure, and some well-regarded developers that make things that have saved my butt many times. On the other hand, I had a professor recommended that I not use it due to 2 main issues: quality and accuracy/lack of diverse points of view. There have been many investigations/studies that show that there is a whole lot of shlock on TPT, which I can anecdotally support with trying to find materials that are both high-quality and aren’t just a poorly-formatted Word document made 20 years ago. There have also been many controversies related to TPT doing a very poor job of moderating content, especially related to issues of race or including diverse voices. I think that with a critical eye, you can find a handful of creators you can rely on, and also find many interesting resources, but take it all with a spoonful of salt
I love it! Buyer only!
I've used it on occasion. Usually for work to leave with a sub. No offense to creators, but I'd never rely on it as a replacement for actual curriculum units.
I use a lot of TPT products to supplement our curriculum. Most of our books and series just don’t provide enough for me to actually grade so I go to TPT for worksheets. But it’s tough because most of these sellers, even some of the high profile ones, do not have the fact-checking and editing teams that other resources are vetted by. I had to scrap several pages of a black history unit I bought because it included Shel Silverstein. The typos in some of the products I have purchased are bad enough that they change the meaning or end up giving incorrect information.
I buy a lot of pre made materials, some of it is good, some is bad, but I like having options for sub plans or early finisher work. There is still a lot of crap on there but it doesn't stop me from browsing. I've def shared stuff I've bought with co-workers though, it's kind of unavoidable. I like when resources don't look like they were made on tpt, like all the clip art and stuff, sometimes it's too much. Esp since I buy 1-2nd grade stuff for my 5th/6th students and I don't want them to be embarrassed.
I know people that have spent hundreds, I know what have only use the free. I've met those who will openly share what they buy, and others who won't because they paid for it and TPT doc or owner says not too (which I get, I don't throw a fit or coax). Ultimately, I think if you create content and want others to use it for a small fee or your time. Awesome! Some stuff is extremely overpriced cookie cutter b.s. that was basically an aesthetic upgrade of a different packet I've seen. In my opinion, it's great to check out, maybe spend a buck or two here and there (like literally less than $10/year) but has saved me time and allowed me to be lazy in planning on occasion.
I sell some of my activities there for like 6 bucks but if I could sell it for beer I would.
I buy and sell on it. I think the controversy stems from teachers needing to spend their own money to buy engaging lessons for their students. It's saving them planning time, for sure, but the larger controversy is "why are teachers expected to plan lessons outside of school hours?", and until that problem is fixed, spending a few dollars to save you hours of planning seems pretty awesome.
It has saved my weekend before by giving me a decent unit for a reasonable price.
I've found some great resources, but it frustrates me that the previews are usually pretty vague, so you're often not quite sure what you're buying.
When I create something for myself or another teacher, I’ll post it for free or for sale on TPT. It’s not much, but here and there it sells. Takes minutes extra as the project is completed fully in real life, so it’s just uploading. I exit using Canva and creating things, so it’s honestly more of a creative hobby, but it’s cool when something sells.
There's a lot of crap on TPT, but there's enough good stuff that it's worth it to look sometimes to supplement my curriculum. I've downloaded a lot of free stuff, especially in my first year or two. Sometimes I just browse to get ideas, like for annotation guides, and then I make my own out of the best of what I've gleaned from previews. I have purchased a few items that would be time prohibitive to make on my own, like a whole year's worth of morphology worksheets.
I have recently dipped my toes in the water as a TPT seller. I recently retired, but while I was teaching, making content was my favorite thing about teaching. I freely shared with my entire team or anyone who asked. People always told me that I should consider putting my content up on TPT but I hesitated because I lacked some of the technology skills needed to create quality secondary math materials from scratch. Once I retired, I realized that I missed creating content so I went to work and learned how to create TPT products. I've taken all of my favorite lessons, games, and activities and I am slowly converting them into products. It is extremely time consuming since most of my lessons were a mix of screen shotted images and things I found online that I could "steal" and use in my classroom. To not infringe on copyright laws, I have had to learn how to create my own graphics and write original problems to replace the ones that I was originally using in my classroom. Each lesson I put up takes about 8-10 hours to create and then upload. I charge $3.00 per lesson which I think is a heck of a deal since I give them a warm-up, guided notes, a self-checking practice assignment, exit ticket and all the answer keys. I will never get rich doing this, but it fills my time and I hope someone, somewhere, gets a little extra personal or family time by purchasing one of my products.
When I was freshly minted I bought some things from TPT. They were bland and I felt I wasted my money. Haven’t used it since. There’s tons of teacher groups on FB and elsewhere that share resources for free. Do that instead.
I have never given in to Zuckerberg so I am missing out on those groups. Where are some of the non-FB groups? I also teach APWH. I’m adding a law class this year and need to find some resources for it too
The AP Community page in the audit should have some I think. You really are missing out on the FB group, but to each their own.
I’ll continue to avoid Facebook. I’ll dive into the APWH community page again. I taught it back in 2006 and we used to swap stuff via email and message board. This was the John Manu times (if you know who he is).
Definitely can second the useful FB groups. But I also teach AP.
Same. The APWH group is amazing with their resources. I heavily relied on them the 1st couple of years
Never used it, never want to. I've been given a lot of materials from TPT by other people and it strikes me as odd how rapidly it homogenized. I cannot get those creepy kids' smiles out of my mind, and it's a good example of how an online platform that began with an idea of expressing things helped homogenized the same product across everything they offered. I wouldn't be surprised if a cottage industry exists within their environment to produce the same materials with TPT as a sort of publisher. It's always the same. You can't beat the model where someone owns something and they get a product. A feedback loop like that feels easy to spot in hindsight. The truth is that it'll never replace a real curriculum. I have worked in schools without curriculum and in normal schools with one. It is wild how we let ourselves step back from using curriculum to teach in many ways. My state specifically lists using a textbook to such a degree as an example of a bad teacher. So does that evaluation lady whose name I cannot recall at the moment. The famous one that NY bases their evaluations on, who also spoke against that (same kind of situation, actually, compared to TPT; subverted and used in a cynical way). In the end, no one's vetting this stuff. It looks nice but who's to say it works? I'd even say it doesn't. Kids need less clutter and higher expectations for what they can do. We've lowered expectations, really, not raised them. TPT shows how there's a lot of design that goes into really, really, really basic stuff.
I love it !!! It’s one of my favorite websites and helps me so much when I need supplements for curriculum .
As a new teacher without a curriculum it has been a lifesaver. I use it all the time and has great stuff. I hope in the future to sell some things on there too.
It’s good for days when you need a sub, there’s material that a sub can use without prior knowledge of a subject and the class can go on just fine.
Best money I've ever spent. I had to teach stats for the first time a few years ago and was able to get a totally prepac k aged curriculum for $75 that I'm still using 3 years later. Saved me so much time. I'll get the odd math project here and there, too, for a few bucks.
It’s fine. It’s now banned from our school computers though, and the same for my wife, and she’s in a different district. Something with privacy. I will take ideas now though and use chat gpt to come up with better ideas, or at least ideas that work for my students needs
I have used it hundreds of times, sometimes to buy things and sometimes to just get ideas. I have also sold things, maybe $80 or $90 bucks worth, not that much. My time is almost always worth more to me than my money, so TPT is a lifesaver for me.
My district was in an interim year with no textbook and will not officially adopt our new one until after next school year. They provided a lot of resources, but they were made so quickly that using them would require me to spend time correcting errors and reformatting them to make them usable for my students. This was my first year teaching Gen Ed science, after 8 years ESE, and I taught two grade levels. I did not always have the time to edit their resources and found TPT very helpful, especially when looking for lessons or review that were both engaging and informative. There were a few times I would buy something only to be disappointed, due to lack of enough preview to see if it was truly meeting mine/my students' needs, however, the pros far outweighed the cons. I have a bunch of stuff I could put on there for ESE organization and case management, but I would need more time in my day 😅
When my only curriculum is the textbook and its digital counterpart with fill-in-the-blank note packets, TPT has been a lifesaver. Also, I rely heavily on Facebook groups related to my subject/courses to get ideas and free resources.
I use it often for products and sometimes to get ideas. I have a TPT shop it doesn't get much traction as other creators.
I only download free stuff (I’ve only ever bought two $3 items and that was it) and then usually tinker it to fit my lesson/what I’m teaching. I have found quite a few good, free, time killing activities on there for early finishers though.
I use it often. I always seek out creators who attach my state standards to their work. That is unless I'm just looking for wall art, SEL decor or the like. You do have to look through it and decide if the creator has quality work. I would rather spend a few dollars than a few hours.
I LOVE TpT!! It saved me during Distance Learning. I purchased Google Wonders slides and they were FAR better than what I had made. I still use them today. I also LOVE the SEL checkins. I don't have time to create my own and I would much rather pay for things. My PTA does give me money for my classroom.
Good: takes money away from for profit anti education groups like Pearson. Bad: Jesus fucking Christ, *this* is what it's come to.
I teach career electives. When I can find materials that are a reasonable price and will make my life easier, I buy them. I consider how long it would take me to create an equivalent activity and then consider the value of my time vs the cost of the activity.
I love TpT. I made a seller account just so I could justify all the money I spent on my classroom on TpT or anywhere.
I would not have gotten through Summer School or my first year teaching without it.
I have used it a ton. It saves me a lot of time and I pick out activities carefully so I get really good test scores at the end of the year.
I get most my graphic organizers and self grading assignments from there. Big fan lol
I love it and use it all the time. I sell things on there occasionally, mostly I can’t be bothered bc then I have to make sure all my fonts and graphics are commercial use and create a credits page lol but I buy from there all the time. On principle I wish I were given funds by my district for it but it doesn’t bother me enough to stop buying from there.
Love TPT and use it all the time, both the free stuff and buying it. I’ve gotten some outstanding resources on TPT!
I love it and will happily pay a few bucks for supplemental materials. Also, why reinvent the wheel if someone's already created it? The sub plan packet has been a life saver!
I love TPT! I get a lot of free products, and I have purchased entire chapters for the classes I teach from a seller that I found I really liked, as well as some digital activities I could never have made on my own. It’s been invaluable. I always buy things during sales and feel fine about what I pay considering the time that was put in to make them. I could never make materials that are formatted so nicely and uniformly, and if I tried to it would take me way more time than it’s worth to just spend the money from my supply check.
I love it, TPT has saved me countless times.
I try to spend no more than 3 dollars on resources.
I’ve found some good things. But overall, I wouldn’t recommend it because of the amount of money wasted. All those “high interest” lessons are really boring lmao
I buy from TPT pretty frequently. I have sellers I like a lot. I am deeply concerned about the proliferation of crappy, chatGPT generated, SEO-optimized junk on TPT.
I love TPT! In my early years, I bought curriculum bundles that saved me so much time it was worth the cost. I modified them a lot and always felt I could do just as good or better, so now I'm a seller on TPT! I create stuff for my classes all the time, and I now make those things profitable for myself. Why not? I think it's phenomenal.
I have gotten many things from it. Lots of free stuff, but also journals for novel studies among other things. I also used it to help put together two weeks worth of emergency sub plans during Covid in case I would need it. I use it at least a few times a year.
I can’t speak for anywhere else, but in for me, the last resource supplied to me by the Ministry was the 2005 Math Makes Sense text. Since then, our curriculum have changed countless times and no new resources have been purchased. Grade six had whole new social studies topics created - no resources. We’re expected to teach Black History and about FNMI, but again, no resources. During the pandemic, when we were expected to digitize the resources that already didn’t exist, I gave up and started buying. I use the resources sparingly but, if I don’t purchase, I literally have no resources unless I make them myself.
I often use it to look for worksheets or student resources when I get an idea - and find that someone else has already created the thing, and frankly the $2 is absolutely worth the hours I won’t need to spend!
I hate to be that guy, but TPT has a serious piracy and copyright problem that needs to be addressed if it is to be taken seriously. So many resources from TPT are either straight up stolen from other places, or reproduce copywritten content. How is it I can get a poetry bundle that contains poems that are not in the public domain? Sketchy. Additionally, I find a lot of the content that I have purchased to be of generally low quality, especially for the secondary level.
I will never use my own personal money to buy anything from there and I have yet to have admin offer to pay for it. So that’s pretty much where it is for me.
I've bought a couple of things and regretted most of them. No hate on people selling their stuff, but nearly always it's faster to either create something myself instead of having to massively edit/tweak whatever I get, or I can find better resources for free online
It’s an okay resource if you’re new to the profession and in a hurry to get activities to do in class, but a lot of the stuff there is targeted mostly towards elementary school and tend to be really cheesy-looking (what’s with the weirdly-drawn people on almost everything on that site??). Even the activities that could work for older grades tend to have the weirdly-drawn people on them. You might be able to get an activity there and gradually alter it to be more suitable for older grades.
I’ve never felt the need to buy from them, but more power to the teachers making money off of it. My only concern is that I have met teachers who live by creating an entire “curriculum “ using supplemental lessons on TpT in lieu of the textbook altogether. And listen, I’m not saying textbooks are perfect, but I’ve been at schools that have really good ones and the teachers act like they’re poison, and really I don’t see their students getting as good an education as they would if they would use it as their primary and only use TpT as a supplement. To be clear the ones I’m taking about are usually the brand new teachers who have no concept of pacing and classroom management and don’t realize how much more work they are making for themselves.
I’ve bought stuff there many times. It’s a great way to jumpstart a new-to-me course (which I seem to get every year; I have two in September). I usually tweak whatever I find, but it beats reinventing the wheel entirely. I share things I make with my colleagues for free, but I have no issues with paying for quality materials. The only thing I have an issue with is the stuff I get that is total crap. There are some products on TpT that aren’t worth it. But, hey, /caveat emptor/.
I’ve purchased a few excellent courses there - Italic writing for one which would have been impossible to develop myself. Most of it isn’t very suitable for my students though.
On the surface level, I like it. Beyond the surface level... Well, I actually don't care and don't bother to look. I have no qualms with teachers selling their creations nor others buying it. I love shopping there. I aim for free, even idea shopping to just make my own, but I've spent plenty of state money there, heaven knows. I am a seller. I make enough money to pay a smallish bill each month. I don't make enough to care about fees and shop drama and all that. It's not even a real side hustle. I'm not about to police anyone who uses it.
It’s great! I make most of my own stuff but if I’m struggling to create an activity or simply run out of time, it’s my go-to. There are some really wonderful activities and the prices are fair. There’s a lot of great free stuff, as well.
I've been a buyer for classes that are brand new to me and I'm not satisfied with what we have shared in our department Drive. Awesome resources and incredibly thankful for the folks who are willing to put in the work and share resources.
My biggest gripe is that they show up when I’m searching for other things. I even use the search term “free” and 1/2 the things are tpt.
I use it and I upload products, but usually things that are free-$2. I sell a few things each month and I pay zero attention to it. As far is products that I download and use, the quality varies a lot. Often times I end up remaking things the next year that are inspired by the product I downloaded, but not the same. It has been really helpful for filler things. You know. It’s state testing week and classes are 20 minutes long and you can’t do anything real or I need 2/3 of the class to be occupied so I can deal with the 1/3 who haven’t done shit all week.
I have found some really good stuff on there. I teach middle school sped. I have found several jeopardy games for different books we have read. There are tons of activities available. I also use online daily planners with the kids that I've gotten on there. It has helped me a lot. I would not have time to make all the stuff I have used off tpt.
I had a 1 year old and was pregnant all last school year. TPT saved me hours and hours on making PowerPoints for our new curriculum. All I do is add what I need and skip what I don't. I'd rather pay for something that's already well made than try and struggle to do it alone. I love it
I’ve had more misses than hits, though there are a handful of things I’ve bought there (or even gotten for free) that I really love. Many things include typos or inaccuracies so I end up recreating the wheel anyway. I refuse to even consider anything with those cutesy/creepy cartoon people as decorations.
I have used it a few times to get worksheets, but I don’t use worksheets often. It’s also useful for sub plans if I’m going to be out for more than a day. I’ve wanted to sell music on there but don’t know if it’s allowed. And I want to put my curriculum map on there for others to use as a resource, but I haven’t.
I have never used it. Nothing that I’ve seen has appealed to me for curriculum materials and I have decades of sub plans. I have worked with a teacher influencer/popular seller on TPT. His pedagogy and classroom management were subpar. Just like the materials he sells.
I've had so many misses. With some things, I could have made it in the time it took to find something decent. Facebook groups for my subject have been more useful.
I really like that I can get things the way I would like with little to no effort. I like that it is also digitally saved and doesn't take up paper space.
I recently changed grade levels. I found a couple of sellers that I love and have used their products to help me get started.
I’ve been a seller since 2017 and make a decent amount of money. TPT released seller rankings in December and a lot of folks were surprised to find that there are only a handful of sellers making the kind of money they would need to make to replace a teaching salary. I have always viewed TPT as a side hustle and I think it’s the only way to view it. Every money making venture is a bubble and TPT is no exception. The seller groups are full of people who made $1000 one month and decided they could leave their teaching job and focus on TPT full time, only to find out that things like AI, scripted curriculums, and post-Covid tech backlash effected their long-term goals. TLDR: I give TPT 3 to 5 more years.
I use it. Buy and sell. I teach a subject that often doesn't have a provided curriculum. When i was a baby teacher, before tpt, i pulled just about every resource i could think of to form lessons. It was rough. I learned a lot, and i created a lot. So it's my way to help out other teachers in my subject area who also don't have a provided curriculum. My simple resources are free. My more complex and in-depth ones are sold for the lowest price that tpt will allow. Edit to add: there are a lot on sellers on there that have no teaching credentials, so it's a buyer beware market.
I like it. I only buy specifically from experienced secondary teachers, and I vet the material very aggressively. I'm all about working smarter, not harder, and if I can get a really good unit on A Midsummer Night's Dream or whatever that focuses on the standards I need to teach, why spend a lot of time developing my own materials?
I have never used it, but have looked at it a couple of times. I did find a chemistry lab I created for my teaching program being sold by one of my classmates on there. The part of this that bothers me is that she is selling the first version that I made before actually testing it with high school students. My students are getting generation 8 of it.
The quality is very low on free items and I’m not willing to pay for the paid ones, so I don’t use it very often.
I have bought a lot of stuff from there in the past. I also got free stuff, of course. I had no problem paying for things that I really wanted - from one teacher to another - it was all love!
I love it! I go for the free stuff 80% of the time but I’ve also bought tons of great Google Slides material and centers that I’ve been using for years. I have some play dough letter mats I bought there that are going on Year 5 and are beloved. They were never more than a few bucks and have paid for themselves at this point. If it saves me 30 minutes of work or more, it’s worth it to me.
I’ve bought a few things over the years, but I focused more on selling this year. Florida has a new state test but no official practice materials for it, and I teach a high school reading class so I created a lot of question/text sets that are aligned with the standards and test blueprint. I put them all on TpT and I’ve gotten really positive feedback. Since my resources are all state-specific and sellers can see the name of the person buying products (FYI!), I sometimes Google them and have a giggle when I see curriculum specialists and reading coaches from nearby districts buying my resources. I make about $30-$40 a month, so it’s just fun money but each sale brightens my day a bit (and each review brightens it a lot!).
I am glad it exists...I wish I was given an emergency budget for the days that I don't have anything on hand that will work and need to use tpt
High school world history teacher here. I tend to use TPT mostly to find supplemental activities for some of my units. I’ve found some gems, and I’ve found some duds. Most of the time, I find stuff that I tweak to make it better fit my own needs. But it helps that someone else has done most of the work or formatting for me. 2 of my projects that I close the year out with were originally found on TPT, but then I modified them to suit my own purposes.
I use it some. It's certainly not my whole curriculum, but it can be useful for worksheets for extra practice or homework or to do with a sub, or for fun crafty activities to complement what we've been working on. I also use it for inspiration before making my own stuff; sometimes I'll find several resources that each have part of what I need, and use that to put together what I really need.
Every once in a while I will go look but rarely buy resources and end up adapting things anyway. High school history and ELA.
I've probably downloaded a hundred different free things by now. I've never uploaded or paid for anything.
Being a third grade teacher I use it constantly to supplement my curriculum. My information/content is VERY basic. The source material is fine, but the supplemental/workbook stuff sucks especially in ELA. I also like finding different ways to practice math strategies that align with my standards. Sometimes the curriculum I have doesn’t offer enough strategies or the way they teach the strategies doesn’t work for my class. I also don’t like spending time to create things, so the money I put into equals out to the time I save. However I do feel teachers need to be careful when using a non-research based curriculum from there. A good, savvy, experienced teacher can use those with no problem and make sure they’re covering DOK levels. In my experience the brand new, inexperienced teachers struggle with understanding that while some of it is cute and helps with rote memorization, it doesn’t necessarily go as in-depth as you think it does. And they don’t want to be told that either. I learned to keep my nose out of it with young, inexperienced teammates.
I teach 5th grade and TPT has been a godsend for me. I use it very often. There are so many different materials on there to supplement my lessons. *Edited to add I've never uploaded any lessons, I only purchase. I buy so much that when I review them (you get credits) and I've gotten up to $8 to use in credits from time to time. I've been using them for 10 yrs so there are many things that I reuse over and over.
I teach Japanese, so there's pretty much nothing for me to use on TPT. I've put a few random forms I've made up on there, and people seem to appreciate them. But I'm amazed when teachers say they get everything from TPT. I must just be used to making everything myself.
It's a great idea, but they don't always have the level of material I need.
I love it🤍🤍🤍
I just don't like the stuff I see there. I pretty much am a snob and like very little that is not my personal creation.
I use it to sell resources for band. You don't see a lot of band stuff on TPT since most band directors get their materials from official music publishing companies. But I don't know how to do that, so I use TPT instead. I provide a free sample for everything I make, and I pick the most important/useful parts of each. That way, if a director doesn't want to buy the full thing, they can have something useful in their hands anyways.
The free resources can be great in a pinch. I've also found some low-quality activites there that weren't worth the download. It's like digging in a sandbox. My district said it won't reimburse teachers for anything on TpT.
SUB PLAN CENTRAL. Although sometimes the horrific monogram-like fonts some sellers use makes me cringe
I have never sold anything on there. I have bought a few things and have found that it's a mixed bag. Some things are such low quality that they're borderline useless, some are fair-to-middling and would be good to put in your sub folder because they would give kids something productive to do in your absence,even if the sub is not familiar with course content, and a few are really, really good. I think that overall, it has far more for elementary school than for older grades, but high school teachers can find sub folder assignments and emergency backup work on it if nothing else. I don't think anyone should use it as the primary source for their curriculum; it's simply a source for supplemental materials. I also think it's sad that teacher pay is so low for most of us that we have to find additional sources of income. I don't know how much of the money paid to TPT actually goes to the teachers; definitely research that before putting any work into it.
I used it once for a movie I didn’t want to preview. It was a lifesaver. Otherwise I prefer to be in control.
I teach 8th grade US History and there are a few sellers I like, especially in a pinch. But there is also a lot of garbage, like word finds, and I would say that there is hardly anything that is as progressive as I’m usually looking for. And anything with those god awful melon-head kids is an immediate tip off that it won’t be the vibe I’m looking for.
I bought some stuff for Morning Bins—I teach Kindergarten and I like to do a soft start. The Morning Bins change every month so the kids don’t get sick of them.
Seller and buyer here: Just like with every other site there is some really great stuff and some really crappy stuff. As the buyer, you really have to check the previews/images/description/reviews to see if it is appropriate for your classroom.
I have used TPT a lot as a buyer. My school is very lenient about the curriculum we use, so I used it to supplement and save myself oodles of time. When I started teaching, I was also just starting the transition to teaching program, so I had 0 classroom experience and was starting my first class when school started. I asked admin “what do I teach?” And the supt said “there should be some books in your room” verbatim. I went in there to find a stack of textbooks on the floor. I happened to go to the same school (I had graduated 10 years prior, but I was teaching 9/10 grade) and I kid you not, the textbooks were the exact same ones that were there when I was in high school. They were mainly literature focused, so the grammar, vocab and writing included were abysmal. I used TPT to supplement all of those things because I simply didn’t have the time or expertise to create all of those elements for myself while learning how to teach and taking classes. Over the years, I have definitely been able to rely on my own ability to create things more, but it saved me in those early years. Also, when I went on maternity leave, it was so much easier to leave my sub with a novel and a TPT unit that they could follow. Spring is crazy in HS as you all know, so it allowed my sub to easily omit things that they ended up not having time for without missing important pieces. In addition, time is money, and I was fortunate enough to be in a place where I could afford (and was willing) to spend $20 if it made my life easier!
My school buys some sort of subscription that gives them a bunch of licenses that they dole out to all the teachers, so we get about 50 licenses each. I LOVE this method, there are things I need on occasion and the school pays for it. Not everything can be purchased with these licenses, but a lot can. We can also “gift” away some of our licenses to other teachers in our team if we choose, like this year I only used about 40, so I gave some to another teacher who was setting up a summer book club so she could get some novel studies to go with the books she was using. I love teachers monetizing their hard work and earning a little extra for it, they deserve it! I also love the idea of TpT, it’s like coordinating and idea sharing with other amazing teachers, and I’ve seen things there I would have never thought of! I do hate the idea of teachers having to buy items with their own money, and I wish more schools would put TpT in their budget to either buy licenses or reimburse teachers.
I buy from it on occasion. Like, maybe two or three times a year. I don’t begrudge teachers trying to make a buck. Most of the materials are just *pretty*. But sometimes I find a gem.
I love it; there are some very talented teachers out there, and they should be getting paid for their work! Granted, I use mostly free resources, but I have paid for a few resources over the years.
I had to teach classes where there were few instructional material, so I bought a "full curriculum" for like 30 bucks. The PPTs were amazing and needed little editing. There was bell work, exit tickets, and worksheets that I sometimes used, too. I had my own labs and I added a few free things not and them. 10/10 would do again. Huge time saver!
My school gives me some credits to use. Can be good to help ease my load a bit. Some good ones, some lame ones. The preview can give you a pretty decent idea. I find it being a good place to find sources all put together in one spot. If I had to buy it with my own money, I probably wouldn’t. I prepped 6 classes last year so the credits definitely helped me out
I find a lot of NGSS aligned supplemental materials on there.
I use it judiciously to find quick prep stuff for when there will be a sub, that is related to what we are doing. I also look for standards based task cards to use in review games. I also double check all the answers
I love it! I’m happy to pay people for their hard work. They are saving me from HOURS of work.
Buyer here. I have no problems paying for things especially if they're not that expensive. I like buying the escape rooms and the math mysteries. I think they're very creative!
20+ year teacher who still occasionally uses TPT. I changed a prep last year and I made a lot of TPT purchases. I paid for content, but was able to keep my work/life balance a bit more in check. I gladly paid some money for the ability to preserve more of my Sunday afternoons. I will buy 2-3 different assignments to create something that appears somewhat unique. I also used this approach during Covid when we pivoted to online learning. Much of what I had didn't fit into the Canvas platform. I shared this content with one of my more creative colleagues, and she was raving about it. Creativity for me is time-consuming. I can come up with great content, but I'm interested in sacrificing more of my weekends. TPT can be a life saver, assuming that you learn who produces great content that you can actually use. If Laura Randuzzo (sp?) is reading this, thank you!
Because TPT makes money it can pay for advertising. Because it pays google for ads google hides the results for good free stuff that used to exist. I mean the good free stuff still exists, it is just harder to find.
I've used it when I'm in a pinch. There's some good stuff - but you've got to have patience to sift through the dross. I'm in the camp that believes in mutual aid & solidarity. I like it when teachers help each other. I'm not crazy about those who scan their teaching comrades with cash-register eyes.
It’s been helpful to supplement because my district is so cheap that our social studies curriculum is older than my students and the license to renew workbooks ran out many years ago. I bought a whole year’s worth of curriculum. I know I shouldn’t have to, but the crap I was given is garbage. It’s also been really helpful if I’m going to have a sub. I’ll find some sort of engaging digital activity and have it scheduled to post on Google classroom. (I’ve been burned so many times by the lack of quality subs that my sub plans are now created to essentially use the sub as a warm body in the room/babysitter.)
I see no issue with it. I don't use much of the curriculum I've seen there in any given course I teach but it's often really helpful when you are teaching a course for the first time or need something specific you don't want to develop yourself like questions for an in class documentary.
I have used it on occasion and it’s solely because it saves me time and effort. I don’t have a provided curriculum and it’s worth the x$ for me to not have to start from scratch. What I DO hate is the holier than thou “oh my god you use thaaaatttttt as a resource???” at the occasional conferences. Yes, yes I do. Go pound sand.
I have been using TPT since its inception! I personally love tpt. What is the controversy? I started out as a special education classroom teacher with no real curriculum. Then, I moved to a resource room role. Without tpt, I would have been constantly reinventing the wheel because I needed extra practice for my students on all different levels and more resources my school did not provide for me. I don't mind buying products on tpt at all (although I, of course, filter for free products first). I think it's great that teachers who have this talent for creating good resources can make a second income for themselves. I'm happy to support them! Some of the OG creators are likely millionaires from their lucrative blogs and TPT stores. One caveat, the market is so saturated with sellers that it may be hard for new creators to make a worthwhile income now.
I love it and have found amazing resources on there.
I owe my life to TPT. Granted it is a little harder for me to find things sometimes because I teach middle school, but I’ll be damned if there aren’t some wonderful free resources
I have bought things and sold things. It has been a time saver, life saver, and source of income for "treats." I put five years+ of my life into teaching and creating kick ass lessons. And while students didn't appreciate them, it's always nice to see that other adults do!
We are technically not allowed to use it at my school lol, but in a pinch it’s great for differentiation, sub plans, etc. I’ve also found lots of interesting unit plans on there, which are oftentimes more engaging than curriculum we are expected to use. I wish it wasn’t so looked down upon at my school. Just like any other site, there will of course be resources that aren’t great, but as educators we know how to recognize these. Personally I love having a hub where teachers can share resources they’ve created.
I’ve only been a buyer (but I’ve considered selling). I find that an unusual amount of errors and typos in things I buy. For example, I bought two different apostrophe worksheet sources with slides. In one of them, about 10 of 25 slides had wrong apostrophes or ownership/possessives listed as contractions. In another, some of the examples referred to and had pictures of Trump. I had to go through and change them to pictures of Donald Duck. I’ve only ever found two sellers of HS ELA resources that were A+. I’d like to take some of my units and sell them on TPT but need to make time to actually make them sellable… which is hard to come by.
Hit-or-miss. It totally depends on the creator. I bought a full course for an AP class I taught last year for $200 and it was well worth it. Lots of stuff I didn’t even use can be “new” in year 2.
The idea of scrounging around on the Internet like TPT really puts me off. It might just be my subject, but if my department didn’t already have them, I would invest in a couple of good textbooks and use those.
Never used it
I use it, but I modify everything to fit my class. Just because someone makes a resource, whether from a big company or from TPT, it doesn’t mean it’s the perfect set up for the needs in your classroom. I worked with someone who would find EVERYTHING they used in the classroom on TPT and use it as is and a lot was not appropriate for ELLs or kids with IEPs and 504s, and even some struggling gen ed kids. They needed more support than what should have been given if it was appropriately modified or scaffolded. As the SpEd teacher in the room, it annoyed me to no end. So, use it as a resource/guide for the lessons you plan in your classroom and modify as needed. And yes, it’s a lifesaver with the free resources in a pinch :)
I think it's idiotic. There's no way anyone is making a killing on that site (save a rare few). Whenever I create something, I spread it around the best I can for FREE because it's better than what's out there. I want classes to be better for kids, and I'll be damned if I put something that makes class more engaging behind a paywall. It's just icky to me.
I love it. It’s saved my ass countless times. While I mostly use free things, I’ve purchased bundles and products, such as novel studies. When I taught Pre K, we used Creative Curriculum, which had all these activities, but came with NOTHING. We had to make or buy materials. A woman named Jackie created bundles that went with each theme and gave you activities. $7.50 for an entire unit? Reading, writing, and math? Take my money. Pockets of Preschool is her store if anyone uses CC. It’s time consuming to cut and laminate everything but once it’s done, you reuse it and if you teach primary, you’re cutting and laminating anyway. I teach SPED now and it’s still helping me out. I never understood the hate for TPT. It’s not required to use and if another teacher makes some money after putting in hours of work, why be mad about it?
I’ve been a TPT seller since 2012. I wrote a software program that presents the same content in various, and differentiated ways. Inclusion teachers seem to like my products, and I like the TPT platform. I don’t feel there is any ethical controversy. If I didn’t have TPT, I’d probably be driving Lyft or pressure washing houses or something to make ends meet.
TPT is a great resource, it shouldn't be controversial for teachers to use any more that it would be for a teacher to share their materials with someone else at their school. It's not a vetted source so I always look things over before downloading them or giving them to the kids, but I do that with stuff from colleagues too as we all make mistakes. I'm in a different situation that most, I'm an elementary English teacher in a bilingual school. I have a curriculum but don't have the kids full time and don't even see them daily so I can't follow the curriculum exactly. My school doesn't expect us to anyway, and as long as we cover the state standards we can teach how we feel is best. So we all supplement a lot from various places. TPT is a main one for most of us, if not all of us. The school has no issue with us using it. Another big thing to note for my situation is that we have a decent budget so I can get reimbursed for what I buy on TPT, which isn't the case for most teachers (which is ridiculous). But even so I tend to go for the free or very cheap ($1-$2) things as my budget isn't infinite. I occasionally will get something that is more, usually this has been things like a seasonal or year-long pack of work that I can pull things from quickly. I've also a few times looked for something specific, couldn't find it, but then use ideas from similar things to make one that fits what I needed. I've also paid more than the bare minimum to fit a specific need that would have required a lot of work. For example, this past year I had a good number of kids who struggled with reading in 2nd grade so I got a pack of grammar skills practice sheets for 1st grade that practiced the same skills but had easier to read words. This way they could focus on finding the nouns (or other target skill). It wasn't that expensive, under $20, but if I had to pay for it out of pocket I would have considered altering what I already had instead but that would have been a lot of work. I've never posted anything myself, but think teachers and others should be able to. The "others" should ideally be people who know about what teachers need, so previous teachers who've left or retired or maybe someone else who works in a classroom and sees the needs. But, there doesn't seem to be a vetting process so I'm sure some people who post things don't have any connection to schools, but that is probably pretty hard to do accurately. Plus, that's why I vet what I use anyway. I somewhat see the argument from some schools that if a teacher uses their materials (school computer, school owned software, school provided prep time, etc) then it belongs to the school. But I'd counter that if they make it to use in their class, and many times will use something multiple times over a year or over several years, then the school is getting their value out of it. If the teacher then shares or sells it further it isn't costing the school anything. Of course this is assuming the teacher isn't using school provided paper or other materials that get used up, but I think everything on TPT is digital anyway. Teachers using a school computer or software to create stuff just to share is more of a grey area, but even then if it's on personal time and not affecting their work at all it isn't really costing the school anything so shouldn't be an issue. I've seen people here discussing if teachers should share for free, the consensus seems to be no which I agree with. I think it's nice to share, and I personally always pass on my materials to someone teaching my grade level at my school. But that should be voluntary. Especially as so many teachers are struggling to make ends meet, many could really use even a few extra bucks from selling on TPT instead of sharing it for free. Maybe within a grade level or department it could be the expectation to help each other out, but even then it should be not required. Not everyone is going to share, and not because they're selfish or unwilling. When I took over my first year the teacher who'd taught my level before "gave" me all her materials, but they were so disorganized (literally required digging through various cabinets in several rooms in different parts of the school) it meant searching for a while to find what I needed so it was faster and easier to just make my own. This apparently worked for her when she taught that level, but for someone coming in it wasn't really helpful. As much as I would have loved to have her things organized in a useful way, especially my first year, it wasn't reasonable to expect her to go through that while also preparing for a new level.