Miami
More than three decades after the program to encourage reading among children first aired on PBS, the show’s longtime host, LeVar Burton, is now focusing his efforts to promote literacy in the digital realm.
“This gets us to more access,” Burton said. “Reaching every child, everywhere.”
Reading Rainbow was produced for television from 1983 to 2006 and became an iPad app in 2012. But Burton credits a successful 2014 Kickstarter campaign as a key point in the show’s revival.
“As a result of the Kickstarter, we were able to bring the entire library service over to the web and develop a product specifically for teachers to use in the classroom,” Burton said.
The 105,857 backers who pledged a total of $5.4 million through the crowdfunding site set a record at the time for the most individual contributors. Seth MacFarlane, the TV and movie writer-producer-actor whose credits include Ted and Family Guy, added another $1 million.
“It was really a people’s movement,” Burton said. “And that was pretty humbling to see in action how much people loved Reading Rainbow and wanted to see it continue, wanted to see it go on and have a similar impact for a whole new generation of kids.”
As an actor who starred on seven seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, followed by four movies featuring the same character, Burton is a regular at science fiction conventions around the country, but he said many fans — both parents and children — want to talk about Reading Rainbow just as much as Star Trek.
The Reading Rainbow Skybrary is a subscription service that includes an interactive library of 1,000 digital books and 250 video field trips. The service was initially geared toward families, but the Kickstarter campaign funded the development of a program designed for teachers to use in their classrooms. The paid service includes 26 weeks’ worth of handouts, lesson plans and a teacher dashboard, and the Kickstarter contributions led to thousands of free subscriptions for needy schools.
Jennifer Evans, who teaches fifth grade at Rod Kelley Elementary School in Gilroy, Calif., has been using Skybrary School since last fall, before its official release earlier this year. She said it’s a great tool that allows her students to find books that interest them at their reading level.
“The best thing for me is that I feel like it’s good-quality literature,” Evans said. “There are other programs on the market right now where it’s like one person wrote 300 books just because they wanted a specific (reading) level, and it’s not real authors writing real books. Skybrary is real published literature that is now in an electronic format.”
A variety of narrators, including Burton himself, read the books to the students while interactive icons and graphics move across the screen, Evans said.
Despite the changes and updates to the new online version of Reading Rainbow, Burton said the core idea of bringing children and books together remains the same.