Reading Rainbow soars online as Skybrary
Last summer, Reading Rainbow, the beloved TV series-now-app, shocked the financial community when it raised over 6.4 million in a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter in just 35 days. It shattered previous Kickstarter records when over 105,000 people contributed to the campaign.
LeVar Burton, the 12-time Emmy Award-winning actor and host of Reading Rainbow, is on a mission "to encourage the love of reading and learning in every child, everywhere." In 2012, Burton and his RRKidz Co-Founder and CEO Mark Wolfe brought reading to kids on mobile when they launched the Reading Rainbow app on the iPad.
After seeing over 16 million books read and fieldtrip videos watched on the Reading Rainbow app, Burton and Wolf wanted to broaden their reach even farther, so they turned to Kickstarter. When they reached their one million dollar goal in just 11 hours, Burton tells me that he was stunned. "I knew that generations of children had grown up watching the show. However, I had no idea that those very same kids, who are now adults, would be so passionate and dedicated to bringing Reading Rainbow back for the next generation." When they continued on to 6.4 million, expansion possibilities became realities.
Skybrary by Reading Rainbow is the first expansion product to come out of the Kickstarter campaign. It duplicates the Reading Rainbow app experience of creating a digital library, but places the reading on the web. Skybrary offers kids a library of over 500 books and 150 videos, appropriate for kids age 3-9. Here's how it works.
Parents set up an account on www.readingrainbow.com/skybrary. The site offers a free14-day trial. A subscription costs $9.99 per month, $29.99 for six months or $49.99 for a year's subscription. Families can set up profiles for five kids, and this account gives them access to Reading Rainbow on all services (web, iPad, Kindle Fire and, coming in a few weeks, Android).
Children are greeted with their own hot air balloons that soar up to seven floating islands in the sky. The islands act as a way to sort the books and videos by categories, which include Action Adventures & Magical Tales, Genius Academy, Awesome People, National Geographic Kids, Animal Kingdom, My Friends My Family and Music Mountain.
By clicking on an island, kids see books to select, presented in a scrolling row. Below the books are video fieldtrips to watch, starring LeVar Burton.
Kids select up to five books to place in the personalized backpack. To read the books, they click the backpack and select a book. Each book has the option to have it read to you or you can read it yourself. For narrators, kids hear gifted storytellers -- frequently LeVar Burton -- read the passages of the books. Every few pages, kids see a colorful moving circle on the page to prompt them to click on that spot. These hotspots present some mild animation and/or sound that is supportive of the story.
When kids finish reading, they have an option to play a memory card game about matching images from the book. By clicking on their backpack, they can return the book and watch it disappear into a slot, similar to returning a book at a library.
The visual of floating islands in the sky, dotted by colorful hot air balloons, creates a wonderfully inviting world for kids to explore. Books to read appear within a frame, making it seems as if you are reading on a tablet. There is no option to expand the book to full screen.
The narration box enlarges as it is read aloud, but the words don't highlight as read, making this service more about exploring books and less about learning to read. As Burton explains, "We feel that highlighting and other 'learn-to-read' tools are a different product." With Skybrary, Burton wants to focus on getting kids to "love to read." With over 500 books, kids are sure to find many favorites within this vast library.
In addition to narrating many of the books, LeVar Burton lends his considerable acting talents to the video fieldtrips. He connects young readers to real world experiences by taking them to such places as NASA, to learn about sound, and to Niagara Falls, to learn about how water is used to create electricity.
Now that Skybrary is on the web, Burton is focused on the rollout of Skybrary for schools. Starting with a pilot this fall, Skybrary should be available to all schools by mid-school year. The school version will include special lesson plans and teacher management tools.
Bonus Tip: For other good online sites for listening to books, check out the Speakaboos subscription service (5 books come free) and the free Storyline Online, where kids can listen to famous books read aloud by members of the Screen Actors Guild. And click here for a list of the best children's library apps for reading books on mobile devices.
Jinny Gudmundsen is the Editor of www.TechwithKids.com and author of iPad Apps for Kids, a For Dummies book. Contact her at techcomments@usatoday.com. Follow her @JinnyGudmundsen.