A central tenet of mathematics education reform is the integral role of technology at all grade levels. Current technological changes combined with changes in mathematics content and instructional method require elementary mathematics teachers to be able to design technology intensive lessons for exploration and discovery of these concepts through appropriate computer applications. In actual practice, however, most computer applications provided for mathematics education consist of software designed for a specific educational purpose--the "solution in a can" scenario. Furthermore, economical constraints often stand in the way of incorporating such special purpose software into an instructional setting. This paper discusses an alternative to this traditional approach which shifts the instructional focus from specific computer applications to more sophisticated uses of general purpose software. In particular, educational uses of spreadsheets are developed as an exemplar for this approach. The methods and approaches described were presented to graduate and undergraduate mathematics education majors in a continuing education course on microcomputers in the elementary mathematics classroom. (Author/AEF)