Helping schools and districts meet their specific needs—such as improving student achievement, tightening accountability, or enhancing professional development—was the main focus of the companies and organizations exhibiting at the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) held June 29 to July 2 in Seattle.

Businesses selling to educators have become acutely aware of the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and are now touting a plethora of new and upgraded products, solutions, and services that promise to meet these new challenges.

For educators the challenge is to separate true value from empty rhetoric. Buyers should always beware, noted John Bailey, director of the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Technology, but it's a positive development that educators are beginning to look to technology for help with real-life problems.

Instead of viewing technology as an add-on, said Bailey, who also advises educators to make informed decisions based on scientific research, educators "are thinking about technology linked to an education problem that they have—and that's a good thing,"

Whether education companies are motivated by altruism or merely self-interest, they are clearly emphasizing their intention to take a greater responsibility for helping schools and districts succeed. In addition to what they are selling, many of the more progressive companies now offer free web resources, white papers, and training designed to help educators understand and address their challenges.

For example, Microsoft Corp. and the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) announced that they have teamed up to build a free online assessment tool to help schools and districts measure their success in using technology for school improvement.

The free assessment tool, available in pilot programs starting in 2004, will give schools the ability to document their progress toward—and support their implementation of—technology standards.

To date, 47 states and the District of Columbia have used ISTE's National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) to encourage and document school improvement.

"Many states and schools are using the NETS standards as a target for improving teaching and learning with technology; the challenge has been finding a good resource for measuring growth toward those standards," said Don Knezek, ISTE's chief executive.

New eRate resource

Another free resource was unveiled at NECC by eRate consulting firm Funds for Learning LLC, which has created a web-based tool that schools and libraries can use at no cost to manage the extensive paperwork required by the eRate. The $2.25 billion-a-year federal program provides discounts on telecommunications services to eligible schools and libraries.

The tool, called eRate Manager, helps eRate participants monitor the status of their funding requests and then generate the multitude of forms that must be submitted to the Schools and Libraries Division (SLD) of the Universal Service Administrative Co.—the agency that administers the program—before eRate discounts can flow to applicants or their service providers.