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Last week the announcement came that Daniel Kinge, founder and manager of Sparklebox.co.uk, has been convicted of a second count of downloading and storing child pornography. Although there have been rumours and chatter since 2007, it seems most were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. As one forum post puts it:

Basically its a nice chap who was a teacher but quit to do Sparklebox full time. He makes teaching resources which you can download for free.

I’m afraid not, fellas. He did it to make money out of advertising (so yes, every time you click on you are boosting his income in jail), and possibly to build a profile and reputation to approach children.

One comment Teachable is tired of hearing is that because we charge our users for access to files, the service is somehow less useful to teachers. At the Teachmeet BETT 2010 meetup last week we got a couple of comments along the line of “chargeable product = bad, ad supported = good”. Every teaching website out there needs funding, either from:

1. Advertising
2. Government subsidy
3. Charging end users

We believe advertising alone is both insufficient to run a good service, and can lead to conflicts of interest when trying to impartially offer educational content. Government subsidy is likely to run out in the UK pretty fast in 2010, leaving 3 as the only viable business model. We are proud to charge our users for teaching resources and half that money goes to contributors.

Unless, like Sparklebox, it’s not really a business at all, but something altogether more murky.

Teachable was shortlisted for two start-up awards in 2009: Seedcamp, a pan-European venture capital competition, and Inspire for businesses in Hampshire. We were proud to be part of both, but it’s our New Year’s resolution to win one in 2010!

This month I came across a great new whiteboard tool for teachers (Scribblar) which enables anyone to start an online whiteboard session and invite their class to view it from any networked computer. Especially useful for home tutoring, when you can upload a screenshot of a document you are looking at and discuss it with a pupil in a different location.

It has all the text and drawing features you’d see on ActivBoard or Smart Notebook, but it does currently lack animation features. At Teachable we looking at ways we could allow easy import of Teachable lessons into Scribblar – do tell us if this would be useful.

I know there is something similar in the Glow system for Scottish teachers, but this is the first such tool I’ve seen that is free for all teachers to try. Using it across a school would cost less than £1000 a year, and it is so simple to use that no-one should require training.