The intention is to reinforce the counterfactual narrative that teachers in the US are overpaid, which is needed to depress opposition to the looting of public school systems.
Now, a market for lesson plans is interesting - and I'm much happier with money going to entrepreneurial teachers actually creating content that might otherwise end up in the pockets of the Blackstone Group or Holtzbrinck - but the real point of this article has more to do with parochial politics.
I was a high school teacher for about a decade and after the first three years, it doesn't take long or difficult to have lesson plans available.
If you want ideas, the school district often has a crap load of them. And if you are teaching a standardized course (like Algebra or Geometry) you are essentially provided lesson plans for every day.
The website is an interesting idea, but it won't make a bunch of people millionaires. It will make 2 or 3 teachers millionaires, with most people who contributed probably losing money for the amount of time invested in creating these lesson plans.
Really, the school districts biggest waste of resources are their teachers. You could easily open source all the teachers lesson plans for the district, then you could freely pick and choose from anyone in your district.
Also, you could do away with those crazy expensive textbooks. Get every kid a $50 android tablet and get a team of teachers to come up with an open source version.
It would take them a few weeks over the summer if you are dealing with experienced teachers.
Then, you update the textbook every summer and the students download the latest version in August.
The school district would save insane amounts of money.
But, they won't do that because the publishers and administrators have corrupted the textbook buying process to a maddening degree. So sad.
> Owner/ Founder: Making-The-Grade Private Learning (Private Tutoring Services).
Your belief that there is nothing more to teaching than a lesson plan - "you could freely pick and choose from anyone in your district" - doesn't inspire confidence in the services you offer.
You also note that you're a Wordpress (sic) contractor. WordPress (note the capitalized P) is open source. Do you also believe that you could freely pick and choose from anyone (i.e. anybody without prior training or experience) to do WordPress development?
I have been an educator for over a decade, and lesson plans are very low on the list of what makes someone a good or great teacher/educator.
Teaching successfully is a lot of things, but for me it is a presentation. Making an interesting presentation and guiding students through a course correctly is the true skill.
Lesson plans are mostly about inserting industry language and cool sounding bullet points into pdfs so that your administrator will be impressed. They are really useful to inexperienced teachers, but are largely an after thought for many great experienced teachers. When you open source them to people in your district, it would be easy for other teachers to get ideas from them and allow them to actually be useful for even the most experienced teachers.
You clearly didn't understand my comment, so please enlighten me on what your theory of teaching and education is and the role that lesson plans play in all of it.
Your question, which was probably rhetorical, about Wordpress (note the uncapitalized p) doesn't make any sense. If you want an honest debate, rephrase it.
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Imagine a third-grade teacher whose class is working on fractions. She opens up her laptop that the school has provided. She ventures into a teacher portal that the district has set up to assist educators. The teacher types “adding fractions” into the search engine. Up pop links to lesson plans that various teachers in the district have used to teach the skill of adding fractions. They are sorted by grade level. Each lesson is rated by a certain number of stars, ratings other teachers have given the plan based on how well it was written and how well it worked in their classroom. There are also links to videos of master teachers presenting lessons on adding fractions. In these videos teachers can hear narration by the master teacher, who is explaining what happened in the room, and why she did what she did. There’s also a message board that teachers can use to comment on the video and share ideas.
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When I read this, I thought "Yes! Stack Overflow for lesson plans"
I don't think it would harm the "traditional collaborative atmosphere of schools". Creating an exchange, even with the option of payment would just improve it
The new thing here isn't lesson plans for sale, it's a marketplace with small vendors. So this isn't a new downside, but sponsored content is a continual worry.
A train carrying delicious Pepsi products is traveling from the Pepsi plant in Pepsi-town to the Pepsi distribution center in Pepsi-city. What is your favorite beverage?
Or does such a thing exist?
I guess I'm torn: I like that teachers are seeing compensation by selling their lesson plans, hate that other teachers have to pay.
(I'm personally working on a site to eventually provide free primers to elementary school age children.)
I think as this industry grows, this becomes a huge issue for retention. Some teachers may decide to leave the profession and produce content full time if they can make more money (which isn't hard in some states).
https://mixergy.com/interviews/flipped-lifestyle-with-shane-...
All that said, sincere props to Paul Edelman for developing a strong community around the site.
The thing that makes no sense is the need for it in the first place. The constant changing of books for the curriculum forces everyone to reinvent the wheel for their lesson plans. So much wasted time and energy that the teachers could be spending actually helping children and being more satisfied. This isn't cutting edge ML research at MIT, it is helping 3rd graders learn about planets, etc.
Why isn't this done at the state level Department of Education? Here is the playbook, follow it and add/adjust as you need to based on your students. Huge time and money savings for all. This is easy to solve with some political will and give-a-shit.
I'm doing 4 to 6 online courses per year I think it's a great way to spend my money. And I always have the same teachers with me
This is likewise true for assessment. Another HN member and I have been developing an assessment creation tool that makes use of a library of shared assessment elements. Still really early in the development process, but it takes aim at this exact issue (while, hopefully, building in some additional benefits: save time, easily generate multiple versions of the assessment for different skill levels, iterative improvement with use, etc). If it comes together, we're intending to branch into general purpose curriculum and lesson performance tools as well.
An educated populace will devise better defense technologies and strategies. An educated populace will create more efficient means of production. An educated populace will strategize better trade deals. An educated populace will create more cultural icons that attract foreign tourists.
In other words, yes, open-source the lesson plans, and increase the education budget by 500%.
Additionally, it often takes as much time to find & modify OER to fit my classroom needs as it does to simply make it from scratch on my own.
You used to just grab this type of stuff out of the 'resource room' every school has, but between the combination of Common Core making old material 'obsolete' and the big educational publishers locking down more material through stringent copyright assertion it's become more necessary to look elsewhere.
Yeah, it is.
Giving a million dollars to a homeless drug addict would kill him within the week. You don't solve the problem by throwing money at it, now.
I said increase the education budget. That's not just money to schools, that's money to education research, schools, teachers, after school programs, parent outreach, and all the other weird little things people don't think about when they think about education. It would shift our country's cultural and political policy towards education - if teachers are pulling 120k salaries, the expectations for their performance would be higher. More people would seek out the extra difficult training to become a teacher because the rewards are worth it, much like people are willing to spend 10 years slaving through medical school for a prominent, well-respected, highly paid job that involves helping people.
Right now the only people that teach are the genuinely good people that are willing to take 24k/year salaries minus personal expenses on classroom supplies, or yea, the shitty people who couldn't figure out what else to do.
Edit: I also wondering if sharing vs selling makes a legal difference? If teachers cannot legally share curriculum materials then every single teacher in this country is breaking the law.