My Intellectual Property Can be Yours for a Price

All that hard work you do to make lesson plans, are they your own? 

Although work that you do at your job should belong to your company, most schools wouldn't enforce copyright law over your work, especially since a lot of teachers to their lesson planning on their own time at home on their own computer. If your boss specifically asks you to develop a lesson plan to share with your department or district then it is the property of the school and they can share it.    If you're paid to write a curriculum then that curriculum is the property of whoever paid you. But in general if the lesson plan is yours even if you haven't submitted a copyright registration, so it is yours to sell if you wish.

Click here for a copyright registration for your lessons if you wish to do so. It's not cheap. Remember these lessons are yours anyway but if you want to sue someone for taking your lessons you would probably need to be registered first so you have proof.

The latest trend is for some teachers is to go to an online lesson plan selling sites and sell their hard work. This has created some controversy in education because in the spirit of being a teacher you should be willing to share your ideas for free in order to further our profession.  I can see both sides, I wouldn't charge for my lesson plans but if a teacher is exceptionally creative and specifically uses their free time to design excellent lesson plans, I think they should be able to sell them without criticism.  This also helps our profession because there are some uncreative teachers out there who really want to do better but just don't know how. The cost is minimal compared to the benefit as most lesson plans are about $3 to $9 but some are actually on there for free. Check out Teachers Pay Teachers here.

Are you willing to share some or all of your work? Do you feel like you use a lot of other people's work? I welcome your comments.