Power Learning 21

Press Coverage By New York Times

The latest news has hit the press discussing the opportunities for teachers to earn supplemental income by uploading and sharing knowledge online. The internet has opened the door to a new way of  learning that is beneficial to both teachers and students. With the fast paced technological world around us, we are always turning toward the internet  to find the information we are seeking at our convenience.  Teachers who want to step into the E-Learning arena and begin making extra income have the opportunity to do so by using sites such as Power Learning 21 (www.powerlearning21.com). The teacher’s interviewed by The New York times have taken advantage the opportunity to sell lessons online  and have reaped the benefits of a vast audience of knowledge seekers.

November 15, 2009 New York Times front page “Selling Lessons Online Raises Cash and Questions?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/education/15plans.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=online%20education&st=cse

Kelly Gionti, a teacher at the High School for Law, Advocacy and Community Justice in Manhattan, has sold $2,544 worth of unit plans for “The Catcher in the Rye” and “The Great Gatsby,” among others, helping finance trips to Rome and Ireland, as well as class supplies.

Margaret Whisnant, a retired teacher in North Carolina, earns an average of $750 a month from lessons based on her three decades of teaching middle school classics like “The Outsiders,” enough to pay for new kitchen counters and appliances.

“I have wanted to redo my kitchen for 20 years, and I just could not get the funds together,” she said. “Well, now I’m going to have to learn to cook.”

Lisa Michalek, 40, who taught for six years in Rochester and now works for Aventa Learning, a for-profit online education company, said she spent about five hours a week tweaking old lesson plans and creating new ones, like an earth science curriculum that sells for $59.95.

“I knew I had good lessons, so I thought, ‘Why not see what other people think of it?’ ” Ms. Michalek said.

After $31,000 in sales, she has her answer. Alice Coburn, 56, a vocational education teacher in Goshen, N.Y., said she saved two to three hours each time she downloaded Ms. Michalek’s PowerPoint presentations instead of starting from scratch. “I hate reinventing the wheel,” Ms. Coburn said.

Others find comfort in having a class-tested lesson by a more experienced teacher. Lauren Perreca, 24, used a $10 lesson on the Vietnam War novel “Fallen Angels” as a reference last year while creating her own lesson for her classes at Weston High School in Connecticut. She also revised her reading questions about “Lord of the Flies” after comparing them with two other lesson plans.

“At first I was self-conscious I had bought something, because what did that say about me?” she said. “But I realized I wasn’t just taking it and using it, I was adapting it to fill in the gaps of my knowledge.”

Now Ms. Perreca has started selling her own lesson plans, like a 54-page “Macbeth” unit with quizzes and homework assignments ($10) that she wrote in graduate school. She said she spent $140 of her $523 in earnings on cookies and books for her students, and used the rest to splurge on dinners out that she could not otherwise afford.

Her students are incredulous. “They’re like, ‘Who would want to buy those? They’re so boring,’ ” Ms. Perreca said. “I’m like, ‘Hey, I’m making money.’ ”

In Ms. Bohrer’s class the other day in Lindenhurst, N.Y., five children were counting M&Ms while she made sure they digested the lesson before the candy. The exercise, which comes with directions, sorting mats and work sheets, has sold 31 times for $3 a pop. A variation with Lucky Charms is popular around St. Patrick’s Day, she said.

“M&M sorting is not a new concept,” said Ms. Bohrer, who has been teaching since 2001. “I made it easier for teachers to do. They just have to click and print.”

Daniel Street’s principal, Frank Picozzi, said he supported Ms. Bohrer’s online business because his students reaped the benefits of her initiative and creativity.

Ms. Bohrer recalled that when she used to share her lesson plans at no charge, a poster of her reading strategies was passed around so many times that it ended up with a teacher in another school who had no idea where it came from.

“I’ll share with friends,” Ms. Bohrer said, “and if anyone else likes it, I’ll tell them where to buy it.”

Visit our How To Blog to get registered with Power Learning 21  and start today: http://www.powerlearning21.com/classes/view/264-introduction_to_power_learning_21

PowerLearning21.com  is now offering self-motivated teachers or experts in a particular subject matter the opportunity to create an instructional video–from html to calculus– and upload it to our site. We will pay $25 for each approved 15 minute video. Each video must focus on a specific topic. Students or anyone interested in a particular subject matter can download these videos for just $2.99. For a limited time, contributors will receive 100% of the revenue until 2010, after which, payment per download will return to $1. To learn more, please contact us at teachersupport@powerlearning21.com.

Compensation: $25 (US) per video plus residuals

In this article today the Wall Street Journal reports that “Even ‘Recession Proof’ Schoolteachers Feel Pinch of Employment Downturn”

The article goes on to report:

Ms. Frommer, 25 years old, said in college she was told teaching was among the steadiest jobs around. Now “there is no job security anymore,” she said.

In a sign of how severe the employment downturn is getting, even schoolteachers, an occupation once viewed as recession proof, are feeling the pain.

Los Angeles Unified School District laid off 2,500 teachers this spring. Broward County, Fla., Ms. Frommer’s district, cut 400 school jobs. Rochester, N.Y., laid off 300 teachers.

This indeed is disturbing news.  We at powerlearning 21 - a place where we encourage teachers and everyone to share their knowledge for profit, believe that the best way to fight the recession and shrinking incomes or the loss of an income is through teaching income diversification.

The idea of teaching income diversification is quite simple - create alternate streams of income and do not be dependant on a single job or have something to fall back on in case of an emergency.

We are creating a platform where anyone who has something valuable to share may easily upload that knowledge in form of a video and teaching aids and start earning extra income.

Please take a look at our site and see for yourself.

Good News!  Coming soon the perfect course for PowerLearning21.com.  We will soon be offering a SAT Review Course taught by an expert.  Think about it a first class review course for only $2.99.  This course will clearly demonstrate the value that PowerLearning21.com can offer.  We are still looking for contributors for other high value courses including for example, teaching parents of college age children how to negotiate through the maze of financial assistance programs available to college applicants.

As the internet grows and specifically the online video portion of the web grows there are many sites that have begun offering instructional videos, such as www.ehow.com, www.graspr.com and www.expertvillage.com.  PowerLearning21.com is fundamentally different than the these sites for the following reasons:

1.)  The sites listed above are free to users and while that may sound appealing on the surface there content quality is suspect.  These sites specialize in short videos that very often don’t provide the information the user is looking for.  PowerLearning21.com on the other hand plans to offer high quality information for the serious user that covers topics in their entirety.

2.)  PowerLearning21.com shares the revenue generated from the sale of videos on the site with the contributor.  By doing this we offer a meaningful way for our contributors to be compensated.

3.)  In order to provide this meaningful information, we do charge for access to our videos, but the price is very low.  $2.99 per instructional video purchased.

In order to make this work however, we need to accumulate a large library of videos from contributors (people just like you) that are willing to share the expertise that they have in return for a portion of the proceeds generated from the sales of the videos provided.

Start contributing today!

We need experts to make our site a success.  Who are these experts?  Everyone .  All of us our experts in something and now PowerLearning21.com offers everyone the ability to share your expertise with the rest of the world and profit meaningfully from it at the same time.  Think about it, sharing your specific knowledge on PowerLearning21.com in the form of instructional videos, educational videos, or how-to video allows the world to learn at an unbelievably low price.   Whether you are a plumber, a lawyer or an accountant you have knowledge that others need and PowerLearning21.com offers you a centralized place to offer to others your knowledge in a video format.  Start contributing today!