The 16th installment in our series: How to Leave on Time and NEVER Take Papers Home Again … Today, we share how Teachers Pay Teachers can save you tons of planning time. https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Created-For-Learning
Watch the YouTube video here >>> https://youtu.be/b0VmX4uIWOY

HOW TEACHERS PAY TEACHERS SAVES YOU TIME

        One of the areas of teaching that takes a lot of time is gathering together teaching resources or creating your own activities that meet your students’ needs. Sometimes you have time to create your own amazingness and sometimes you don’t. This is where online teaching marketplaces like Teachers Pay Teachers can save you so much time, so you can get out of the classroom on time, and spend time at home doing what you want to do.
Teachers Pay Teachers (or TpT as all its fans call it) is a community of teachers sharing their best teaching lessons. So before you spend 2-20 hours creating your own, you might check TpT to see if someone has already created a good one. These are teacher experts like you ready to save you time.
I had an acquaintance get her first full-time teaching job. She was talking about prepping for her new grade and classroom and I asked if she had seen TpT.  She had heard of it, then it was so cute because it was like a confession that she didn’t know how to “TpT.”  I realized that since we have a store on TpT and use TpT so often we have learned some tricks to use it well.
So once you get to the website, how do you “TpT” and quickly find the resource you want?

HOW TO SAVE TIME WHILE SEARCHING

Go to www.TeachersPayTeachers.com … The main page may change day-to-day, but you’ll find a showcase of teacher-authors and resources that have stood out in some way. The menus on the left are great for browsing, so explore away if you’re just looking for new ideas.
If you already know what you need for your classroom, go to the search bar and search keywords for what you are looking for. Say you want to teach The Giver novel so you search “Giver.” This search gives us lots of different resources. Scroll through and see which ones look like your style. (Use the cool Control-click trick to open multiple tabs to look closer later.)
        Then you could add to your search and go with “Giver Vocabulary” or something like that to narrow the search down.

WHEN YOU’RE COMPARING RESOURCES

Make sure the one you buy has what you need from it.

• Read the descriptions.
• Look at the 4 preview images
• Download the longer preview.
• Read the customer reviews at the bottom.
• Read the Q&A for the product and make sure the resource doesn’t have big problems that you care about.

Basically, you want to make sure it’ll save all the time you’re hoping to save.
And if you’re shopping for your whole department, you can “Buy Licences to Share” for ½ off that will save all your teacher friends time too.

ONCE YOU FIND SOME STORES YOU LIKE

Here are some more little tips:

• • If you are logged in, you can “Follow Me” and then that way every time you log into TpT you will see updates for the stores you have followed.
  • Custom categories
  • Best Sellers & Price ranges
  • Grade levels, Subject, & Resource Type

• • Sort by “Most Recent” Resource

• There is even a search section for the particular store to see if they have something on the topic you’re looking for.
• Another Valuable Time saver is the “Ask a Question” tab.  If anything is unclear in the description or if you have any question about a resource, check here.  You can use the search shortcut “Control F” (the “CTRL” key and “F” key at the same time) on a PC or “Command F” on a MAC and search for a keyword from your question. It will only search for that page . . . notice we have 729 questions

All of these are some great ways to cut hours from your planning time after school, on the weekend, and during summer.
Conversation of the Day: What ways has TeachersPayTeachers.com saved you time? And what other TpT timesaving tips do you have?

Hop on over to watch the video and share your thoughts in the conversation.