Tech and techless

I am writing this blog post from my tent on the Appalachian Trail. Through a great amount of effort, I convinced my school to allow me to lead weekend backpacking trips over the next two months. Despite the day being rainy, the 4 boys that came along have had smiles on their faces all day. The trip has been difficult. Not physically for me, but mentally. I have had to switch from the leader who does everything to the instructor who sits back and gives advice. Backpacking is something that I have been doing since I was 12, and for the last 10 years, something that I have been comfortable doing on my own. Now I am in the role of teaching these high school juniors and seniors the same skills I learned at there age. The problem is, I have them on autopilot and when I have to instruct, it slows everything down immensely. Navigating takes longer, dinner takes forever and cleanup happens after sundown (which is terrible when you have to do it by headlamp.) However, I am here to teach these boys why it is fun, and that it isn't such a technical, challenging experience that some people make it out to be. I need to work on sitting back and putting my confidence in these guys. After all, we've been prepping for this stuff after school for the last two weeks. This trip has been a huge wakeup call to me and my teaching skills.
On a technological note, I had a very successful class using laptops in a productive manner. Most importantly, I got the students to have their laptops open for the whole period and kept them so busy that they didn't have time to be distracted. The assignment was to work in groups of four and build one to three slides on a specific type of pollution. The students sit in groups of four, so I asked each group to designate a scribe. Most groups immediately pointed at the highest achieving student at their table, thinking the rest of them would not have to do any work. I had expected this, so once I had the list of scribes on the board, I then announced that the scribe was in charge of designing and arranging facts , but was not allowed to do research. I emailed a link to each of the scribes for a Google slides presentation and assigned each group a type of pollution. Their handouts had criteria for what the slides should contain and a warning that messing with other slides or posting inappropriate things in the slideshow would result in an automatic 40% reduction. This is because in the past the students have used Google docs for study guides to post strange pictures of their peers in my class.
The lesson went perfectly and the students were excited to share what they had found on their pollutions. They were also excited that they had just built a great study guide. I'm glad that I am getting useful ideas and strategies from this class.