NaNoWriMo

This past week I had the chance to participate in the PBS For the Love of Lit webinar on NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month. A few takeaways:

• Offering students the prospect of writing their own novels might seem daunting. But many teachers (and kiddos) attested to the power of the challenge in supporting students to claim their roles as not just writers--but authors. 

• The NaNoWriMo website includes extensive resources to support teachers and students in working through the 30-day challenge including curriculum documents and student workbooks. Most of the activities are general enough to support the writing process outside of this challenge--so these could be useful materials to review to design any writing project. Nothing too groundbreaking, just a clear focus on the basics.​
• I might be most excited about Book Creator, a resource that was shared as a free tool for students to build their own digital books. As always, the 'degree of free' is limited, but it seems like on a small enough scale this could be a wonderfully open-ended platform for students to explore and design. This student sample reminded me of the literature digital portfolios we designed in my English 10 course, with much greater functionality supported by this tool. I'm considering how this might be integrated into (1) the multiliteracies book project or (2) integrated into a writer's or reader's workshop project.