Do student teachers have it easier now than 20 years ago?

I was having a conversation with a fellow co-worker about how today's student teachers don't seem as stressed about student teaching as we were when we went through it.  As I think back to 1999, I remember wanting to show a three-minute clip from a documentary for one of my classes.  That involved me setting up my VCR to tape it when it came on TV, taking that tape to the school and fast-forward to the spot I wanted, recording it onto another tape with our dubbing system, checking out a TV/VCR cart and finally having it ready for class.

Now, I search for a clip on YouTube, and I'm done.  3 hours of time down to 20 seconds.

However, I believe it is a different generation with different needs that our student teachers are teaching.

Who had it easier?  Hard to say.

Talk About Putting in Some Hours on TeachersPayTeachers!!

Holy smokes!  For the past two weeks I've been burning the midnight (and weekend) oil redoing every product I have for sale on TeachersPayTeachers.  I didn't really know what I was doing when I started.  For example:

 

1.      I had my items priced WAY too low.  I started out selling at $0.25 thinking I'll sell more this way.  Not knowing that there is a $3.00 minimum to checkout.  Therefore 99% of my items are at least $3.00 now. 

            Sales went up.

 

2.      I didn't have any previews in my items.  I spent HOURS adding previews to all of my items in a collage format so customers can see the whole item.  I know some people just take part of their item for the preview, but I like the collage way so I went with that. 

            Sales went up.

 

3.      My cover pages were tiny.  The titles were too small to see from the main page.  Therefore, I changed all of my cover pages by creating them in PowerPoint and setting the slide to 8" x 8" and saving the slide as a .jpeg

            Sales went up. 

 

4.      I started to bundle a bunch of my items together and offering them at a discsount compared to buying each item individually. 

            So far sales haven't gone up on these like I thought they would, but I'll give it time.

 

5.      I was adding my items to Pinterest directly from my TpT store.  This was a big mistake.  The cover pages are too small to stand out on Pinterest so I now use the cover file I created in PowerPoint as stated in #3.  

            Slowly getting some repins and followers on Pinterest

 

6.      I started adding hyperlinks to my products in my product descriptions.  Use this forumula in your description and just add the url of your product where it says WEBSITE and what you want it called where it says TITLE.  <a href="http://WEBSITE.com">TITLE</a>

            I can't wait to see how this pays off. 

So feel free to learn from my mistakes and do all of these things above right away.  Maybe you haven't done these things and you're already established on TpT and want to redo your products using the steps above.  I currently have 69 products.  My estimate is that over the last two weeks I've spent 40-50 hours working on fixing everything.  Will it be worth it?  I certainly hope so!

 Good luck!