Tuesday I attended one of the TechTerra workshops provided to Rowan-Salisbury media coordinators.

While I was there, TechTerra’s creator, Susan Wells, began pulling out green-topped tubs, opening them up and showing me all the treasures she brought with her. There was a 3-D printer, a robot you could make play the xylophone, a board featuring brightly colored chips as pieces of code to program a robot’s movements across a map and a sort of motion sensor that allowed you to interact with items on a digital screen.

I actually neglected my note-taking for a few minutes because I was having so much fun exploring and playing with some of the things Wells set out for me.

And I think that’s the heart of it.

The technology debate is huge. Whether it’s parents complaining about selfies and smartphones or the public scrutinizing every step of the one-to-one transition, people will find some way to criticize technology. They’ve been doing this since I was a kid and the internet became more than an information tool. Raise your hand if you remember the internet safety debates and the chat room debacle of the late 1990s. I do.

Since I’ve started working as the education reporter, I’ve been bombarded with questions about technology and its effects on children. Are kids losing the ability to write by hand? Does it cause part of their brains to shrink? Is this actually beneficial for students?

The answer is, I don’t know. I’m not sure anyone knows. Technology like iPads and programs like one-to-one haven’t been around long enough for science to have performed any proper, longitudinal studies on its impacts on children.

Being a millennial, I’d like to think better of technology, but the truth is that I don’t know any more than the people asking me these questions.

And the truth is that one-to-one may fail. Integrating technology in the classroom may fail, may take impossibly longer than we imagined, may be too expensive to maintain on tight school budgets or may be detrimental to students in ways we can’t foresee.

But I don’t think those possibilities outweigh the good it’s doing now. I mentioned the heart of it, didn’t I? Technology, even if it turns out to be, in some unknown way, impractical for schools, is creating incredible opportunities for kids.

Tuesday I was able to observe and interact with things I’d only read about, and in schools kids are learning to code, kids are being encouraged to create.

TechTerra’s thing is helping media coordinators build spaces where kids can interact with and create and build projects and think outside the box. And yes, technology can facilitate that, but it can be done without it – and is, in our school system. These are opportunities I never thought I’d see in a school. These are things I would have given anything for as a student.

There were great programs when I was in school, and I had great teachers. But school is hard if you can’t focus on listening, or don’t like sitting still or can’t pay attention for long periods of time. They’re things I learned how to deal with, but now, when I see teachers incorporating activities that pull those jittery, restless kids into a lesson, I can’t help but feel a little jealous. Most of my schooling was lecture and worksheets. Most of my schooling was preparing for tests.

And a lot of those things – a lot of those tactile, active, critical-thinking pieces – arrived in our school system along with laptops and iPads. Because both are different ways of thinking. Both go against the grain of traditional schooling, and take a bit of courage and a lot of work and creativity to pull off.

Maybe the tech will fail. It will certainly be outdated before five years have passed. But it’s brought a lot of good with it, too. Kids are recapturing a sense of wonder and play and ease of access that, in my opinion, has been missing from education for a long time. And I think that’s worth acknowledging and celebrating. So maybe the tech will fail, but it is not a failure.