I’m Joining TpT
Over the past 4 years I’ve been building Artsicle.com. It has evolved through many versions into an amazing community of artists - a place to showcase their work, connect with others and better allow the world at large to discover them. As part of that evolution, we have started the process of turning Artsicle into a non-profit organization. I’ll be sharing more about this decision and what it means for us soon, but today I want to share another big announcement.
I am joining Teachers Pay Teachers - or TpT as we like to call it - as Engineering Lead. If you haven’t heard of TpT, think Etsy for lesson plans, curriculums, and educational resources. Teachers can find the materials they need to better serve their students or, better yet, share and sell their own resources with peers. TpT is putting valuable time back into the hands of teachers who can use every spare minute - while putting dollars into the pockets of highly-deserving educators. It’s working, it’s a hell of a mission, and it’s an incredible place to be.
I see a huge opportunity for TpT to lead the education space to make the changes that the tech world has made in recent years. On your next application, you wouldn’t build a web server or database from scratch. No, you would “stand on the shoulders of giants” and take advantage of everything that open source has to offer. In many ways, TpT is the open source of the education community. Everyday teachers are asked to re-invent the wheel and create their curriculums from scratch, while catering to dozens of different student needs. This results in an incredible amount of duplicated work - but it doesn’t need to be. When I’ve visited classrooms, I’ve seen that the real art of teaching is engaging students and helping them overcome their individual obstacles. TpT has the potential to free up teachers’ time to focus on students. By leveraging the global teaching community, TpT can give them the exact materials they need for the problems at hand with a single click.
As you might expect, there are huge technical challenges to be overcome and I’m putting together a tech dream-team to design solutions for our educational future. We’re building a fantastic engineering culture that is focused on the same ideals our community has taught us: a culture of respect, collaboration and learning.