My school values collaborative planning and one-way this manifests itself is in our grade level QUIP (Quality Unit of Inquiry Planning) days.  A week or two before beginning a new unit of inquiry teachers are given a ½ day of release time to plan with the members of their team, our curriculum coordinator and our PYP coordinator.

We have 5-9 classes at each grade level so there is usually a morning group and an afternoon group. As a teacher-librarian, I try to be present for most of the day in order to effectively provide resources and support for the unit being planned.

I have tried only popping into QUIPs when the group is “scheduled” to discuss resources but I find I miss too many important things that come up throughout the day. That being said, there are times when I don’t need to be part of the discussion. I have started taking my iPhone to the meetings so I can at least stay on top of my work email and Twitter (we don’t have school laptops and are not allowed to access the wireless network with our personal laptops – which deserves its very own blog post someday). At our most recent round of QUIPs, I started asking the coordinators if I could jump on their computers to check the library catalog, Library Video, Titlewave and other relevant sites. On Wednesday, I also showed up with my Mac Book. Although I couldn’t use the Internet, I was able to work on my previous blog post when I wasn’t involved in the discussion.

And this brings me to the title of this post. During the session this past Wednesday, I was sitting with my laptop on my knees and my iPhone in my hand and one teacher said, “Oh, look at Megan and her toys”. While I do have a fair number of fun game type apps on my iPhone (most of which I use to amuse assorted children when I visit my brother), I wasn’t using any of them – I was working, but to this teacher, the tools I was using were just “toys”. I was a bit dumbfounded and didn’t know how to reply so I just smiled and let it slide. However, it bugged me and got me wondering about how we can work to change some people’s perception of technology as simply toys.

How do we get teachers on side and using tech with their students if they view it as playing with toys? What should I have said to this teacher?