The educational potential of the computer is already apparent, but the jury is out on how soon and how extensively the computer will be incorporated in everyday instruction. Computers are by far the most powerful teaching and learning machines to enter the classroom. Students and teachers can interact with computers in ways impossible with film, radio, and television. Depending on the software, preschoolers through graduate students can write and edit, learn languages, have a machine "tutor" in algebra, retrieve a great variety of information from electronic disks or distant libraries, receive E-mail from students a continent away, prepare multimedia reports, and use state-of-the-art technology in drafting, auto mechanics, and office work. In special education, computers help blind, deaf, and multiply-disabled students read, write, and communicate in ways that heretofore were unavailable. These various uses of the computer, valuable in themselves, will still require the integration and sense-making that a good teacher can provide. And whether teachers will embrace this new technology depends in good part on the ability of technologically minded reformers to understand the realities of the classroom and to enlist teachers as collaborators rather than regarding them as obstacles to progress.