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.

Career Trek is a career awareness curriculum designed to teach students about the world of work. Career Trek helps teach the importance of personal responsibility and good work habits, the development of skills to interact with others, an understanding of how to make decisions, and the development of skills to comprehend and use career information. Appropriate for 4^th-6^th graders and above, Career Trek helps children broaden their career awareness and discover the importance of school.

The Career Trek kit includes...

• Teacher’s Guide with 60 learning activities, targeted at fourth through sixth grade students. Overheads and worksheet masters are included and can be printed as needed. This guide is provided on a CD.
• Occupation Card Deck with 190 cards that use descriptions, symbols, and illustrations to present occupational information. The cards can be used for classroom and small-group activities.
• Dictionary of Occupations is a book of descriptions for the 190 Career Trek occupations.

Career Trek is only $50, plus shipping and tax, one-time purchase. This is something every 4^th, 5^th and 6^th grade classroom should have! For more information, see the Career Trek brochure. 

To order Career Trek, 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.

Registration is now available for three new workshops sponsored by WOIS.

The three workshops are:

• Dependable Strengths for Educators
• Creating Schools with Heart and Soul (Where Students Want to Be)
• How the WOIS Electronic Portfolio Supports Advisories, Navigation 101 and Culminating Projects

Details about each workshop are listed below.

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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.

Fall training registration is now available online! Reserve your spot today - space is limited. (Free clock hours are available.)

WOIS Basic Training – 5 hour free Training:

Basic Training is free to all WOIS user sites. Topics covered include Electronic Portfolio setup and usage; Assessments; WOIS Occupation, Educational Program, and School Information; other resources; and basic site administration.

WOIS Advanced Portfolio Workshop:

This workshop provides participants with hands-on experience in:

• administrative set-up of the WOIS Portfolios
• learning how to help students record, store, and upload important information and documents to meet the requirements for your career and educational planning needs, Navigation 101, Culminating Projects, and Student-led Conferences
• learning how to help students use their WOIS Portfolio to deliver their Student-led Conferences and Culminating Projects
• effectively retrieving administrative reports that document student progress
• using the Portfolio notes section to communicate with students through the Portfolio.

Register today – this workshop filled up quickly the last time it was offered.

Workshop cost: $65 per person. $50 per person for two or more people attending from one district.

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.