TeachersPayTeachers.com (TpT) has emerged as an alternative to traditional curricular publishing houses; however, the critical investigation into this for-profit platform is limited. The aggregate content offered and downloaded from the platform through 2019 was Web-scraped, enabling us to construct a content model of TpT and provide descriptive results regarding the interactions between content, technology, and users/usage on TpT. We find TpT’s content model implicitly redefines what constitutes an education, elevating holiday activities and classroom decor to the same level as established curriculum. In terms of content, learning standards were largely absent and user ratings were uniformly high, casting doubt upon the validity of these technological features. 87.9% of resources were under $5, however, many small sales add up across users, indicating the platform extracts significant value from educators and schools. We discuss how the online educational marketplace phenomenon stands to impact the future of curriculum production and the teaching profession.

Online curricular marketplaces such as TeachersPayTeachers.com (TPT) are challenging conventional notions of curriculum, the professionalization of educators, and the exchange of capital in P-12 education. In this research note, we explore these issues by presenting an accounting of: (a) the size and scope of TPT, (b) the number of TPT resources being downloaded, and (c) the financial transactions associated with TPT educator-storefronts. Findings indicated that TPT hosted 4,018,173 classroom resources from 208,748 educator-sellers with 1.5 billion all-time downloads and $3.9 billion in total sales. 69% of all TPT downloads were of free materials. However, an overwhelming 81% of total TPT sales were attributed to the top 1% of educator-sellers (n = 1,524). TPT’s massive scope suggests it has introduced an important disruption in P-12 curriculum, with implications for the professionalization of educators. Furthermore, TPT’s unequal distribution of wealth across educator-sellers suggests disparities in the extent to which individual sellers are part of this disruption.

Twitter and other social media have assumed important places in many educators’ professional lives by hosting spaces where new kinds of collegial interactions can occur. However, such spaces can also attract unwelcome Twitter traffic that complicates researchers’ attempts to explore and understand educators’ professional social media experiences. In this article, we define various kinds of spam that we have identified in our research on educators’ uses of Twitter. After providing an overview of the concept of spam, we evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches to addressing the presence of spam in educator-focused Twitter spaces. Then we suggest practical, holistic metrics that can be employed to help identify spam. Through secondary analyses of our past research, we describe the use of such metrics to identify and deal with spam in three specific cases. Finally, we discuss implications of spam and these suggested methods for teacher educators, instructional designers and educational technology researchers.