You loved Reading Rainbow as a kid. Everyone did! But since the show went off the air in 2006, your ol' pal LeVar Burton's now trying to bring it back via the internet. He just needs a little Kickstarter help to do it.


Two years ago, children's literacy hero and former PBS staple Burton came out with a Reading Rainbow iPad app to stave off kids' inevitable tablet brain rot. But now he wants to bring an unlimited library of books to a much wider audience. Not every kid has a tablet. And many schools don't have access to tablets, either. But many, many kiddos have internet access in their school or local public libraries.


So what's the plan here? Burton wants to develop a web-enabled Reading Rainbow for at-home use, create a classroom version along with lesson plans and teacher-friendly tools, and subsidize the cost so any school can use Reading Rainbow anywhere for free. Burton has set out to raise a million dollars, and has offered up plenty of prizes for donations that run the gamut from a LeVar himself recording your voicemail, to hanging out with you via Skype to sending you an autograph. But what matters most is this will help more kids learn how to read. And although a million bucks sure sounds like a lot, this is without a doubt a Kickstarter we can get behind. [Kickstarter via The Verge ]