Join us on a journey as we navigate the myriad of tools designed to propel your Teachers Pay Teachers business to new heights. We'll take a deep dive into the essentials and discuss how to choose wisely based on your goals and budget. Get ready to uncover the true value of popular platforms like Flatpack and Bear Wood Labs, and learn how to streamline your workflow to maximize efficacy and minimize costs.
Imagine transforming your educational content with the power of AI, especially in crafting mathematics materials that captivate and educate. In this episode, we explore how AI can revolutionize your marketing strategy and product development, from generating initial drafts to perfecting engaging content for your audience. I share my experiences, guiding you through the integration of technology with creativity to ensure your TpT business not only thrives but also resonates with your personal touch and educational values.
Join us on a journey as we navigate the myriad of tools designed to propel your Teachers Pay Teachers business to new heights. We'll take a deep dive into the essentials and discuss how to choose wisely based on your goals and budget. Get ready to uncover the true value of popular platforms like Flatpack and Bear Wood Labs, and learn how to streamline your workflow to maximize efficacy and minimize costs.
Imagine transforming your educational content with the power of AI, especially in crafting mathematics materials that captivate and educate. In this episode, we explore how AI can revolutionize your marketing strategy and product development, from generating initial drafts to perfecting engaging content for your audience. I share my experiences, guiding you through the integration of technology with creativity to ensure your TpT business not only thrives but also resonates with your personal touch and educational values.
Welcome to the rebranded teacher podcast. My name is Lauren Fulton. I'm a full-time teacher, author and seller on teachers, pay teachers and I help other teacher entrepreneurs grow their TPP businesses in a way that's purposeful and sustainable. So if you're looking for actionable, step-by-step ways to grow your business, you're in the right place. Let's get started.
Speaker 2:For the next two weeks here, we're going to be taking a little break from our coaching call series Don't worry, we're coming back to it but we're going to be talking about worth it applications, subscriptions, memberships, things like that that are worth it inside of your business. So we're going to be talking about things like SEO or growth tools, and this week is product creation, and I'm really, really excited. I know most of these tools that I'm going to mention are going to be things that you're familiar with. Maybe some of them you've wondered about. Probably some of them you already have. Or if you're brand new and you're wondering, what do you need to invest in, this is going to be a really great episode. Or if you're trying to figure out what's going to be a time saver, what's going to be a money waster. So I want to first start off by talking about my two-year-old, or my then two-year-old. She's no longer two, but last year we decided that we were going to put my two-year-old into music classes.
Speaker 2:Now, these music classes were supposed to be very enriching. You know what I mean. Your kid shows up, they learn about music, they sing, they dance, they do all that kind of stuff and it's really fun. The thing about it is that these music classes lasted just under 30 minutes. They were usually about 25 minutes long and they were about $30 a lesson. So every single month you're paying for these lessons and you pay for them, whether or not your kid shows up, and then your child shows up for 25 minutes and they're getting this really incredible, enriching experience. That was the idea and, honestly, that's how it was set up. But for my two-year-old it was absolutely not worth it. We really tried to make it work. We did it for several months. My husband and I would take turns taking her to these music lessons and at the end of the day it was not worth it to us. But here's the thing there was another two-year-old in the class. It was absolutely worth it for that two-year-old and for her parents.
Speaker 2:The difference is the expected outcome, what it was that we were each wanting to get out of it as parents or each wanting our child to get out of it as parents, and how our children performed in that environment Right, their two-year-old was what I would describe as being very mild-mannered, very easy-going. My two-year-old was all over the place. It was basically an exercise in discipline. Every time that we went right. My husband or I, whoever went would get an absolute workout.
Speaker 2:We were in this teeny tiny room. My child turned into a wild child and wanted to touch all of the things and do all of the things and didn't really transition well from one activity to the next, probably due to our age. She would probably excel in this right now, at her age now. But we would be dancing and popping bubbles one minute and then the next minute she was expected to sit down and to be calm while a storybook was read, with lots of different beats and claps and things like that, and she just was still stuck on. I want to do the bubbles, oh, and there's a guitar over there hanging on the wall. I'd really like to touch that guitar. There's a mountain of chairs that are covered up with a blanket that I shouldn't be touching. I would really like to explore that blanket, right. And so we finally decided you know what? Probably story and music time at the library is a better fit for her and it's also free, right.
Speaker 2:However, it was a really incredible experience for the other two-year-old, who was able to be fully engaged, fully present, and who has just had a lot less energy, or at least a lot more focused energy than my two-year-old, and you might be like well, where are you going with this? The whole point that I'm trying to make is that it's the same way for your business. So for the next few weeks, we're going to be talking a lot about like is this product worth it, is it not worth it? And the answer is really going to be a lot of times it depends. It depends on where you're at. It depends on what outcome you're looking for. It depends on how much time you have. How are you planning on using this tool, how much you're going to be able to use this tool, how much time it's going to save your budget, et cetera. It's going to depend on so many different things, and so, while I'm going to try to keep that in mind and try to give you some perspective in terms of, if you're at this spot in your business, you might not find it to be worth it. If you're at this place, you may really want to invest in this.
Speaker 2:At the end of the day, there aren't any hard and fast rules for these tools. There aren't any tools that are absolutely worth it for everybody. Some people are going to find that one thing works really well for their business, while other people are going to just find that it isn't worth the time or the energy, the effort or the money. Okay, I want to start with one that is extremely popular and gets talked about a lot and, in fact, is a favorite. So whenever I asked inside of a couple of different Facebook groups, like what are some tools that you love and or want to learn more about, flatpak was at the top of the list for and in fact, most bare wood products were bare wood labs. Products were for tools that people were absolutely loving and found to be really worth it in their business.
Speaker 2:If you're not familiar, flatpak is a tool from bare wood labs and what it allows you to do is it's basically a PowerPoint add on. So if you create resources in PowerPoint, it will flatten I mean, turn your pages into images and secure your document with a PDF password all in like one click. But it'll also allow you to keep certain text from getting flattened with everything else, right, so I can exclude clickable links from being flattened so that they still work, et cetera. It is, in my opinion, an absolutely invaluable tool because and you can see the price here in just a second. I'm going to share my screen with you guys here in just a minute so that you can see some of these different bare wood lab products I have find that it's absolutely invaluable. It's a one-time fee, so you only have to pay for it once, which is really nice. It's not a subscription, so it's kind of a one-and-done situation. I've actually purchased three different licenses for Flatpak one for myself, one for each of my VAs who routinely flatten resources for me, and so I really love it and it's something that I always want to have at my disposal.
Speaker 2:The only thing that I would say about Flatpak is that it's not going to be the only tool that you need. If you routinely have to combine PDFs after creating them so, for example, if I'm having to like unlock that resource, go into Adobe or go into another editing software to add, like my Terms of Use pages or things like that, then all oftentimes, depending on what software you're using and we'll talk about this a little bit more when we get into Adobe Acrobat you are going to mess up the securing of that document if you upload it to say, like small PDF, to merge documents or things like that. So you have to understand that it's a tool that only works inside of PowerPoint. So just bear that in mind. Right, it only works inside of PowerPoint.
Speaker 2:Let's talk about other bare wood labs products. So this is just barewoodlabscom, and I've just gone to their product section. They have bundles, which is really nice. You can buy a bunch of different things all at one time. I believe that I've purchased and used their Bingo Creator and thought that it came in really handy. Like I've said, I've purchased Flatpak. They have it for Mac or for PC. I've also purchased this TPT Store linker. I have not used it. It seems really interesting to me because you're able to like, let's say, that you have a PowerPoint where you're pulling in related products. You could easily change those out and link to those related products from within your TPT Store linker and it'll automatically pull in the cover image for that product which is really nice and link it. So that can be a time saver, but I haven't utilized that fully. I'm 99% sure I purchased this Puzzle Maker. This is one of those things where it's like I'm kind of a serial buyer and that I found this to be really useful.
Speaker 2:I would say for most people probably, the product description editor is not going to be something necessarily that you need. It's going to allow you to do a few extra little things and you can look at it yourself, but for most people I would say you probably don't need all of that. But yeah, flatpak, for sure, any of these simple game products are going to come in really handy. However, there are other tools out there that will allow you to create word searches or what have you, but this really allows you to do everything inside of PowerPoint. So that part is really nice. For anyone, I would say these items are absolutely worth it because they're free.
Speaker 2:So the first would be the related links generator, and this is extremely helpful whenever you're linking to products within your store, so within your product description. So I can come in and I can say you know what I want to link to my other area and circumference of a circle resources, and then just click copy for a new TPT editor and I can paste that into my product description on TPT and it's going to show up just like this. So it makes it really, really nice because you're not having to go hunt through your store and grab those links. These are obviously not going to be links with UTM codes or anything like that. But most people don't really want UTM codes because it's too much to track for all of those related products. But this is really nice, okay, and it's free.
Speaker 2:The other thing that's free is this TPT product overview. So you can go in, connect this to your store and you can see the product ID, the name of the product, date. You can see stats for it. If you want to, you can add in what the description is and you can save all of those to a CSV. That way you have them on hand in case anything terrible were to happen. Or it's really nice, like I used this for my VA for when she was uploading resources into my Shopify store. It's kind of nice to have everything all in one place. You can even add in your cover image, so you have a record of all of that. But, yeah, it's really that part is really nice. Those are both free tools again, so you can't beat free. Free is always worth it, okay. So, yeah, I love that one.
Speaker 2:Let's go back to number two. The next thing would be Canva Pro. Okay, so this is one where it's kind of iffy in terms of product creation. So I use Canva Pro for a lot. I use it to create things within my membership. So these are not products that are paid for and for sale on TPT. These are products that like I've got a workbook that I create every single month with an RTA or creating my slides or creating graphics for events and things like that. I use Canva Pro all the time. For me it's absolutely worth it, even if I'm not creating products to necessarily sell on TPT. It's worth it to go ahead and have the pro subscription. That way I can have pro elements. That way I can have all my branding colors and my branded fonts uploaded. I can have team members who are hooked in and they can work on a project with me and we both have access to the same documents. It just makes it really, really handy.
Speaker 2:But here's what I would say. I would say that if you are not using it for product creation or for a resource that you're giving out to people or something like that, then it may not be worth it to you, unless you're doing a lot of marketing. So Canva Pro to me there are terms of use seems really really clear that if you have Canva Pro, you could create a resource that using their elements in the same way that you would use Clipart that you purchased from TPT, making sure that you're not just selling elements by themselves, but using their element as, like, a Clipart, as part of your resource or whatever, making sure that you're securing that appropriately that you could sell that commercially. To me that's extremely clear. However, there are some people who have reached out in the past to Canva for clarification on this and received mixed answers. So, like some people would tell them, no, you can't do that. Some people will tell them, yes, you can. Probably best to just not create TPT resources for commercial use from Canva Pro, probably better to just work in PowerPoint where you know for sure that everything's good. That's what I would say on that.
Speaker 2:So if you're not using it for a lot of marketing you're not doing very much marketing and you're not using it for creating resources, then I would say, in general, canva Pro may not be worth it to you. But under the circumstances like if you're doing a lot of marketing or you have resources like, for example, I've created resources in Canva before that I do not sell but that I've given to my audience and be like, hey, you can have this right here, even sharing, like the template with them from Canva like just sharing a Canva template. That has been worth it for me. So just kind of depends on how you want to use. It is going to determine whether or not it's going to be worth it for you. It also kind of depends on budget too. Canva Pro isn't very expensive. I think it's like 12 bucks a month, and for some people $12 a month isn't that much. But if you're just starting out, $12 a month might be quite a bit. So just kind of depending on where you're at in your business as well.
Speaker 2:The next one is Adobe Acrobat. I want to talk about this one because I get this question a lot with newer sellers. They're like if I purchase a flat pack, do I need Adobe? If I purchase Adobe, do I need flat pack? And the thing about it is the two work really well together. If you have Adobe, you do not need Flatpak, you just don't.
Speaker 2:But it could take you longer to do the same thing right. So, for example, right now Flatpak is not working on my device not the fault of the creator at all, it's actually my own fault. I reached out to the owner and he told me exactly how to fix it and I never did follow through with it, because I don't end up securing a lot of documents. My team usually does that for me. So if I'm gonna secure a document on a whim like this weekend I've got a document that I have to secure and I'm gonna do it on the whim I'm going to export that document from PowerPoint into images and I'm gonna turn that image into a PDF, open it within Adobe and save password protected from within Adobe. Okay, so a few extra steps doesn't take that much longer. But if you're doing a lot of documents like that, then it takes time.
Speaker 2:But here's the thing that I also do which has caused me to purchase both. So I have two different licenses for Adobe. I have one for myself, have one for my VA and then I have different licenses for Flatpak. So pay for two different Adobe subscriptions and have paid for different PAC licenses. Here's why I pay for both is because within Flatpak I've flattened and secure the resource. But a lot of times I create resources that would be in landscape mode and my terms of use pages are portrait, so I can't have both slide sizes within PowerPoint. That means that in order for my VA to merge my terms of use with the resource and to merge those two different ones. She either has to have access to Adobe to combine those pages or she can upload it then to something like small PDF or whatever to merge those two PDF documents. Okay. The issue is, when she merges them at a third party source, it removes the password protection that Flatpak added to it, so that password protection has to be added back in when she combines those PDFs in Adobe. We don't lose any of that, so that's why I pay for both.
Speaker 2:Again, I could choose to either not pay for Flatpak or I could have two different versions of my terms of use. I could have them in portrait or in landscape so that I could add everything in PowerPoint and flatten and secure it from PowerPoint. But there are also times where I just wanna go in and I just wanna change the leak real quick or I wanna update something, and it's really nice to just be able to do that within Adobe. So just kind of depending on where you're at in your business, what's worth it to you? For me and my business it's worth it to have both because I can work as efficiently and as quickly as possible with both. But you don't necessarily have to have both, like you could make one or the other work for you.
Speaker 2:Let's talk about number four, chat, gpt, the thing that everybody wants to talk about these days, ai and using that for product creation. So there aren't, you're not gonna get in trouble for using AI for product creation. We can use the content that's created commercially. I'll tell you a little bit about my experience with it, how I use it personally for product creation and how I utilize those products. So I think it's gonna get a lot smarter over time. It's gonna become a lot more effective. So if you're watching this video, like a year from now, you may be like, yeah, that's no longer an issue.
Speaker 2:But currently I'm in math, so I've found that it's not 100% accurate. In fact, it's probably not even 50% accurate when it comes to providing problems and solutions. So maybe if we're talking about addition and subtraction and things like that, it might be really good, but we're talking about algebra, algebra, two geometry, things like that it's just not very accurate. So I can't rely on it to write problems and solutions for me. But what I can do is I can have it start things for me or give me a list of ideas. So, for example, if I'm writing word problems or a story or something like that. It can give me the foundation or the basis. It can give me those ideas.
Speaker 2:I know for me personally, when I sit down it's really easy for me to write a problem like three halves plus four thirds right, that's a no brainer. But to put that into a word problem, especially if it revolves around a theme like a Christmas theme or a Thanksgiving theme or something like that, takes a little bit more brain power. Still not difficult. But at the end of a long day it still takes brain power and sometimes I don't always have brain power to spare. So having something to think of different ideas for me with word problems, where to give me sentence stems or things like that, or to write the basics of a story for me the other thing that I've used it for some of my marketing.
Speaker 2:So sometimes in an email I'll tell them like hey, I've got the next three days of lesson plans planned out for you for right before Thanksgiving or right before Christmas break or right before the holidays and I'll have it write 12 different word problems for fifth and sixth grade, or 12 different word problems for, you know, eighth grade and seventh grade and eighth grade, or for algebra and high school. Whatever I'll say, give me 12 different Thanksgiving themed word problems or Halloween themed word problems for these grade levels. From those 12, I'll pare it down to my the best 10. And then I'll sift through those 10. And I'll make sure that it's actually doable, that it actually makes sense or, you know whatever just kind of tweak them a little bit, because they usually all need tweaking, or at least most of them need tweaking to make a little bit more sense.
Speaker 2:But it takes me, you know, 20 minutes to provide them with a really simple, like Halloween, themed Google document sheet, right? So this isn't anything fancy, this is just something I'm sharing with them on a Google Doc that they can choose for their students. They can make their own copy, they can edit them, they can pick which one they want to use as a warm up that day or as an exit ticket, something like that. But it allows me to give it to them for free, right? And it allows me to provide a resource for them, provide them with an idea and a way to implement an idea very quickly and easily. Okay, I've also had it generate like, would you rather questions for me or things like that, to be really fun warm ups or really fun little exit ticket and I can quickly just take those and turn in. Same for puns or what have you, or giving me general ideas. I've used that in terms of product creation. Again, I don't sell those resources. These are just things that I'm able to provide very quickly for my audience and give them a little bit extra In addition to like maybe I say I would pair this activity with one of these questions as a warm up and that way I'm able to give them some original questions.
Speaker 2:They're not having to go search the internet. They're still themed, it's still providing them with value and it's still something that my audience can use and can take away from my email newsletter, even if they don't purchase anything from me. So I've used it for that specifically. I've also used it to create really simple resources for free that I've added to, like, my Shopify store and I'll say like hey, you can get these greeting cards or whatever it is, these math themed pun greeting cards download, like this downloadable for free whenever you purchase this product for me. And so I'll use that like as I'll have it write puns or I'll have it write something on there, and then I'll just kind of and then I can just place those and I'm not having to think or be creative. I can let it be be creative for me and it's something that I can give for free as a thank you to my customers for a limited time when they purchase a product from me. So just lots of different ways that you can use that, apart from just trying to have it write everything for you.
Speaker 2:But honestly, if you want it to write short stories, have it write short stories. I've done that for my toddler. I'll give it a very specific prompt. My husband's better at this than I am. He'll have it write dinosaur stories about my three year old and a dinosaur. He'll tell the details about what the dinosaur looks like, what kind of dinosaur it is, what my daughter looks like, and he'll tell it like write this story for a three year old. It needs to be this length, etc. So you can do those kind of things and get some really good ideas from chat GPT.
Speaker 2:Right now the limitations would be that it tends to kind of repeat the same ideas over and over again, so like if I tell it to give me 12 problems that are Christmas themed for adding subtractions a lot of times it'll give me, like the same John had this many cookies, or to Santa and his elves, or Santa and his reindeer drove X amount of distance, whatever, and it's like it'll kind of use those same story lines over and over and over again. It seems to be getting better about that, that it seems to be having more unique ideas, but I still think it's a really great tool to utilize, especially for ideas for free content for your audience and work. Chat GPT is free, so definitely play around with it, have a little bit of fun. I would be shocked if you found that you didn't need to tweak anything or didn't need to change anything up as far as having it write all of your content for you. I would absolutely steer clear of that, because it doesn't have the expertise in your niche that you have.
Speaker 2:Chat GPT has never been a teacher. It doesn't know how to work with students in a classroom. It doesn't know how students learn best. It doesn't know how to meet the individual needs of a classroom teacher, and so if you're creating content that is specifically just made by Chat GPT or just made by AI, you're probably going to find that the shelf life for that content is going to be really short. You're going to find that those resources are not going to meet the long term needs, or teachers are going to quickly figure out how to create that same exact content for themselves. So you still want to make sure that your meeting needs for teachers and your meeting needs for students in unique ways and you're not just trying to quickly put resources out there. That's not the goal here.
Speaker 2:All right, so hopefully this has given you some good ideas. It's given you an idea of whether or not different resources are going to be worth it. And if you have a product creation tool that you have found to be worth it, drop a comment down below and share it with us. Or if you have a product creation tool that you want to ask others about and see if others have used it, our Facebook group is a really great place for those conversations. You can find the link to that free Facebook group down inside of the description. Guarantee you probably somebody else has already used it or would be interested in testing it out for you, right? Thanks so much for being here, you guys. We're going to be back next week with another episode. We're actually going to be specifically looking at SEO tools. So tools to help you with keywords, search engine optimization, things like that. This was the biggest category in terms of requests. They can't wait to roll it out to you guys. See you next week.