For a long while, many of us have seen the need for a free kids dictionary that could be used on mobile devices. Since none seem to exist that are at a kids’ level and are “kid appropriate,” I’ve always had an idea to make my own, but haven’t done much about it.
Now that’s about to change! With my recent growing interest in the Open Education movement and mass collaboration, I’m going to start a collaborative project to create such a dictionary. Most likely, this will be on a wiki platform, like Wikibooks.
The focus will be on having simple kid-appropriate definitions targeted at a grade 5-8 level. Everyone will be able to contribute, and we’ll be looking for lots of help!
Then after we have a critical mass of words, we’ll download the content and convert it to a variety of platforms, including Mobipocket for handheld use and probably some kind of offline desktop format. We might even do a skinny version for mobile phones.
If you are interested in working on this project, stay tuned for more details. We’ll be getting a prototype and perhaps a mailing list together for this soon. And whatever we come up with will freely usable by anyone.
Count me in.