After 30 years of teaching a multitude of subjects at schools throughout the county, Germantown’s Joyce Lansky began her second career creating educational resources for educators and students across the country.
For the last eight years, Lansky, who has educated every age group from kindergarteners to high schoolers, has operated her business, Catch My Products, through the popular teacher resource website Teachers Pay Teachers.
An estimated 7 million teachers have used Teachers Pay Teachers in the last year and 1 billion resources have been downloaded from the site, which described as the “go-to platform created by teachers, for teachers to access the community, content and tools they need to teach at their best.”
Founded in 2006, Teachers Pay Teachers provides a marketplace for educators to exchange instructional materials and access easy-to-use digital tools.
Today, the site empowers teachers with the world’s largest catalog of more than 5 million pieces of educator-created content.
Lansky, who spent much of her career working with gifted children in the local CLUE and APEX programs, has created and uploaded everything from logic puzzles to high school and elementary book studies.
She has created nearly 800 educational products for the site and also specializes in presentations to help teachers prepare for evaluations.
“It is helpful for (educators) to have a friend to go through things, slide-by-slide,” she noted. “It is very beneficial.”
Lansky creates two to three new products each month and has seen growing success in selling her learning resources in “bundles.”
“I’ll put several products together at a discount,” she said. “Those have been doing well.”
Lansky said she has seen traffic increase on her site since she began posting on Pinterest. She added that she works with other creators on Teachers Pay Teachers to enhance sales and products.
“We work as a group,” she noted. “I make things that I am familiar with and so do the others.”
Noting that she generally makes her highest sales in September and October, Lansky said her best markets are currently Texas, New York and California.
She offers several free products on the site and said she plans to keep creating resources for as long as she can.
“I’m creative,” she said. “I started by constantly making things for my kids and just kept going.”
While the COVID-19 pandemic altered many local businesses, Lansky said that sales began to climb last March, likely from students and teachers needing extra resources while unable to attend classes in person.
When she’s not creating educational resources, Lansky spends much of her time writing and has even completed five unpublished novels.
For more information and resources, go to www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Catch-My-Products.
