Through an online travel blogging and social media course called Wandering Educators, Kathryn Blanco is now a published author.

Kathryn, an eighth grade student at Newtown Middle School, is listed along with her fellow students from the course as one of the authors of Journeys in Words: Chronicles of Avid Travelers Volume 1. She took the online course outside of her middle school classes after her father, Martin, discovered it.

The book is available to purchase for Amazon Kindle device owners off of Amazon.com for $2.99, and it is free to download for Amazon Prime members.

Kathryn is in her second term of the course. She explained recently that each week students in the course are tasked with an assignment about writing or photography.

“At the end of the term, we each picked a couple of articles and they were published in an e-book,” said Kathryn.

Journeys in Words was created with entries from Kathryn’s first term.

Kathryn’s favorite project so far with Wandering Educators was called “Weird and Wonderful.” Students were asked to find somewhere strange and interesting to write about.

“So I actually went to the Connecticut State House for that one, and they have this museum of curiosities room there that I never knew about,” said Kathryn. “So that was just to explore places around me.”

One of her articles in Journeys in is about visiting Stew Leonard’s in Danbury.

Kathryn said she expects Volume 2 to be published relatively soon.

For more information about Wandering Educators visit www.wanderingeducators.com.

“It’s a great program,” Kathryn said. “I was able to do things I was never able to do before and met people from all over the world. It was a really unique experience.”

Kathryn’s co-authors for Journeys in Words: Chronicles of Avid Travelers Volume 1 are Austin Weihmiller, Emily Zumchak, Shelby Lewis, Hannah Miller, Anne M. Driscoll, Jessie Voights, and Brianna Krueger.