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. 

Now your students can enter their Academic, Career, Community and Personal Goals, and the reflections about those goals, directly into the WOIS Portfolio.

Then, of course, you can administratively see which students have completed their goal setting through the WOIS Portfolio.

This is another way the WOIS Portfolio supports your Advisory and/or High School and Beyond requirements.

Give it a try -- we know you will like it!

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. 

Now WOIS Portfolio administrators can Query the Post-High School Plans and Occupational Goals for students who have entered these details in the Education Planner section of the WOIS Portfolio.

This can be useful if you have a career speaker (let's say a Physical Therapist) coming to the school and you want to know which students have indicated Physical Therapist as an Occupational Goal.

It may also come in handy when you have a college (maybe Washington State University) visiting.  You can query the portfolios and get a list of the students who have indicated WSU as a college of interest.

After the query identifies the students who have indicated the selection, the administrator can send a note to each student (via the portfolio) to let them know the visitor will be at the school.

The query only works on entries in the Education Planner section of the WOIS Portfolio.

Each section of the Electronic Portfolio has a report associated with it that can be used to print the contents of that section - Assessments and Tests, Career Research, etc. Now, Portfolio administrators and group managers can print batches of reports from the administrative side of the Portfolios. Just select the Portfolios you want to print reports for from any Portfolio "List" page, like the Student List or Detail View, click "Generate reports" at the bottom of the page, and choose the report to generate.

The WOIS Electronic Portfolio has been added as an option for middle schools and junior highs using Career Explorer. Students can save their Career Explorer assessment results, save links to the occupations they explore, and start building their electronic portfolio with student activities, results from other tests, resumes, essays, educational plans – everything that is available in the high school version of the WOIS Electronic Portfolio. Then the Electronic Portfolio can seamlessly follow the student to the high school.

The cost to add the WOIS Electronic Portfolio to your Career Explorer subscription is only $230 for this year. If you are not currently a Career Explorer subscriber, and want Career Explorer and the Electronic Portfolio, the cost is $405 for this year.

To order Career Explorer and/or the WOIS Electronic Portfolio, e-mail Tami Palmer, call 1-800-700-WOIS, or send your purchase order to WOIS, 1415 Harrison Avenue NW, Suite 201, Olympia, WA 98502.

We've recently added a component to the Electronic Portfolio for creating and storing Student Learning Plans (SLP) in students' portfolios. Based on sample formats from OSPI, you can enter test scores, areas requiring improvement, and responsibilities for improvement for all parties involved - the basic requirements for an SLP. When viewing a student's portfolio administratively, the Student Learning Plan section lets you enter or edit details of the student's Plan. Student can view, but cannot change, their SLP. Also, for schools that have a specific format for their plans, a file upload function is available to upload an SLP in whatever format is appropriate - Word document, PDF file, etc.

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.)