Because WOIS moved to a new database structure to integrate National Colleges with our Educational Program and School sections, our old School Compare tool was taken out of our program for a few months. 

But now it's back -- and even better than before!

You can still access School Compare from the Assessment menu on the left-side menu, and the Schools menu.

Now your students and clients can also compare schools they have saved in the School Research section of their WOIS Portfolio!

And, your students and clients can save schools to the School Research section of their WOIS Portfolio, after they have done a School Compare.

Try it out!  You will love it!

If you have questions or ever need a training or demonstration, contact tami@wois.org or call 1-800-700-WOIS.

WOIS/The Career Information System is Washington State's most comprehensive career and educational planning resource and is used in over 900 sites in the state of Washington.  WOIS has provided career assessment tools, detailed information about occupations, educational programs, and postsecondary institutions, along with supporting activities and resources, for more than 35 years.  WOIS provides complete, accurate and up-to-date information for Washington State and NOW also provides national wage, outlook, and college information.  As a non-profit organization, our goal is to provide these resources, and related training and technical support, at the lowest cost possible, to the institutions and organizations in Washington State. 

As we do every year at about this time, we've advanced your students' Portfolios to the next grade - 9th graders were advanced to 10th grade, etc. Also, if you've configured your middle school's Portfolio settings to automatically transfer a particular grade (8th, 9th, etc.) to the appropriate high school, those students should now be transferred. You can also use the Transfer to another site button in Portfolio Administration lists to manually transfer students from one WOIS site to another.

We've added new functionality to the Culminating Projects section of the Electronic Portfolio. Now administrators and group managers can leave feedback for students about the files they've uploaded for their culminating projects. You may also document approval status for project components. When logged in administratively to review student's portfolios, there is now a checkbox on the list of files for recording whether that file/component meets standards (is approved), as well as a text field to leave feedback that student will see (but not be able to change) when they go into that section. We've also replaced the "number of files" columns for each project component with a "component approved" column on the Culminating Project Files report in Portfolio Administration.

As always, feel free to give us a call at 1-800-700-WOIS or mail tami@wois.org if you have any questions about the new features.

Portfolio Transfer: To accompany the Automatic Grade Transfer feature we added recently, you can now transfer multiple portfolios to another WOIS site that has the Electronic Portfolio product by selecting them from any administrative list/report page and clicking Transfer to another site at the bottom of the page. This way, if most of the students from your middle school will go to High School A, but some will go to High Schools B or C, you can set the automatic transfer for High School A and, before the automatic transfer happens in August, manually select the students who will be going to High Schools B and C and transfer them yourselves now.

Template Portfolios: Some WOIS sites have asked for the ability to have required classes show up in the Education Planner. You now have the ability to create a template portfolio. Here you can put in the required classes for each grade level, or pre-load anything else into the portfolio. After creating the template portfolio, set it as a template in the Settings section of the Portfolio Administration. To set the portfolio template, type the User ID of the portfolio into the settings. Whatever you put into the template portfolio will then be copied into all student portfolios created after you set up the template portfolio.

New functionality for the Portfolio Notes feature we added last month: you can now post a note in any section (or the main menu) of multiple portfolios - or clear existing notes - from any of the administrative list/report pages by selecting the portfolios and clicking Post/clear Notes at the bottom of the page. (The new note will replace any existing note in that portfolio section.)

As you may be aware, your site can create Portfolio Groups to organize your users' portfolios. We've now added the ability to assign portfolios to more than one group. When users initially create their portfolios, they select the first group to be assigned. After the portfolio is created, additional groups can be added to or current groups deleted from the Portfolio Profile.

When logged in administratively, you now have multiple options when you select one or more portfolios and click Assign to group: Add group, to add a new group to those already assigned; Replace existing groups, to replace any current group assignments with the new group you've chosen; and Clear groups, to clear all groups assigned. If you're just changing group assignments for one portfolio, that portfolio's current groups are displayed and can be deleted individually by clicking on the group title.

Finally, we've added a Clear all group assignments button to the Portfolio Admin Groups page that you can use to clear the groups from all your portfolios.

Yes, we've added another new Portfolio feature!  This time, it's an electronic version of a "post-it" note that you can place on a user's Portfolio Main Menu, or on the index page for any portfolio section.  When you are logged in administratively, or as a group manager, and you go into a students' portfolio, you'll now see a text box for the note at the top of each section for which Portfolio Notes can be entered.  To post the note, just enter the text and click Save Changes.  When the user enters that section of their portfolio, they'll see the note, along with the date you entered it.  They will also see an indicator on their main menu to let them know they have a note in that section.

A new Portfolio Notes report in the Portfolio Administration shows the dates and sections for any notes you've entered in your users' portfolios.