Hi, this subject has probably come up already at some point, but I have been away from here for a while so forgive me....
Do any of you use your computer for music notation? I have been searching and found programs like Finale and Sibelius. I want something that is very easy to use for my beginning and intermediate students, when we want to write something out.
Thanks for any tips. I am pretty low tech so whatever I end up with must be easy to use, thanks.

Open source AND free: http://musescore.org/

Cheap: http://sonicscores.com/

The other you already know...

To annotate Nikolas' suggestions, something like Musescore is the way to go unless you need (and can afford) one of full-scale Finale or Sibelius setups.

There are some cheaper, stripped down derivatives of those big monster packages but in my opinion they borrow a lot of complexity and hassle from their big sisters while not really enabling you to do anything important that Musescore will not do.

So if you want to spend hundreds of dollars buying and hundreds of hours learning, pick one of the Big Two. Otherwise, just get Musescore and have done with it. In my inexpert opinion.

I agree that, of the free offerings, MuseScore is probably the best and most stable. Personally, I think that Sibelius is worth what it costs, in terms of faster data entry and robustness. But I would be reluctant to buy a whole bunch of licences for it when MuseScore is free.

Thank you very much!

I use Finale hours every day of my life, and there is very little I can't get it to do for piano music notation, but it takes a LONG time to learn it, and LOTS of patience...

I use Noteworthy Composer. The demo is a free download, the full version is dirt cheap. It does far more than the dumbed down versions of all the major software.

It won't do some of what Finale or Sibelius can do. But it has yet to fail for what i need.

I've had good experiences with noteflight.com. It's done entirely online and makes it really easy to organize the students files with personal log on and passwords.