Today while listening to Scott Meech discuss an idealistic view of technology education I noticed a Freudian slip. He meant to say “point and click” but said “click and point”.  I believe this was unintentional.  But it raised the question in my mind, is there value to asking teachers to think “Click and Point” instead.

First, what is traditional “Point and Click”?  According to Netlingo (a great online dictionary of technology terms) “point-and-click: A commonly heard phrase used to describe the act of putting your mouse arrow (or cursor) onto a menu button, for example, and then clicking on that selection to activate a program or utility.”
My understanding is these are the simple routine tasks we complete that take little effort or thought processes.  We simply find what we want, point our mouse to it, and click the mouse button.

But now the question is raised, is this an efficient and valuable use of time and resources?

Perhaps it would be more productive to ponder the phrase “Click and Point”.  My way of looking at this would be visit websites (urls), click your mouse, and then point out the value contained on the page display or the lack there of, as may be the case.  I find this concept interesting.  Perhaps it is better to encourage teachers to coach students in becoming better thinkers, analyzers, and evaluators.  A website’s displayed content may have intrinsic information readily available as words, images, multimedia, etc.  But isn’t the true value in the excitement of finding greater value that creates higher order thinking experiences.  You can view a page and give it little consideration.  Or you can view someone’s post (be it a static page or blog) and begin discussion, interpretation, integration, and many other nouns that pertain to classroom knowledge acquisition.

Thank you, Mr. Meech, for a thought provoking presentation this afternoon.  I encourage respectful comments.  Let me know if you agree or disagree with my opinion by leaving a comment.  If you attended Tech Forum Northeast ‘09, I hope you found a thread or two to take home and weave into a larger fabric of technology integration in school.  I will try my best to bring the threads I gathered back to my district and assist teachers in weaving them together and through their current curriculum covers.