I don't know when I got my first computer in the classroom. I know I was still teaching in the middle school, which would have made it around 1994. The computer was a macintosh and I don't recall exactly what I used it for other than grades. I know I bought my own grading program. Some teachers had set up a program on excel to do theirs, but I didn't have that ability. I think the name of the program was something like easy grade pro and as I recall, it wasn't cheap, forty or fifty bucks. I used it for a year and then the school provided a similar program for us. I do know there was no internet connections at the time. Later, I got a powermac. That was my next school computer and that seemed so much more powerful. I don't know when exactly we got the internet but I know it was on that computer. My first computer at home was also a Mac. I bought it from Montgomery Wards, I financed it with zero percent financing for a year, and I believe it cost 1800. I had dial up internet with that one forever and first used AOL. They didn't have a local access number, but they did have an 800 number which cost 10 cents a minute to use. The trouble was it was so slow, it took forever to load graphics. It wasn't uncommon for it to take two or three minutes to load a page, so my bill for the month for internet was something like 16 dollars a month but the extra 10-15 for the AOL was unpredictable. I think it was a lot later before I got high speed internet at home. I still hate paying that bill at the end of the month. Until last year, in January, I had a big old desk top computer and when we got the laptops for the cff grant, those were replaced with these laptops. That's what we have at home, too- a dell laptop. Both the kids got laptops as freshmen at Grove City. When they came home, it became obvious that dial up was really slow, and they couldn't use their computers at home because of it. They complained a lot about it. My son nowhas a dell desktop and my daughter has returned to the world of macs. I really like hers; it seems so much more user friendly but they cost more and don't always run the same software that pc's do, though there is much more compatibilty than there was previously. I think the one thing I like about hers is that there aren't a ton of viruses out there that will infect a mac. I don't know what apple's market share is, but I suspect it's less than 10%. Who would have dreamed we'd be doing journals on line? Who would have dreamed that I could sit here at my desk at school and with my webcam, talk to Mr. Wallace across the hall, or a teacher at Cedar Crest or my daughter in Florida or a school in California. I do think it's important, however, to remember that computers don't make us smarter; they simply allow us to work more efficiently.