ONLINE CAREER & EDUCATION SOLUTIONS - 2009/2010
High School High school is a time of exciting transition as students progress towards creating the life they desire. Bridges empowers high school students with the engaging tools they need to create personalized plans for post-secondary and the workforce with our college and career planning products. Our online assessments and inventories build student self-awareness about abilities, learning styles, and personality types, while our test preparation courses help them achieve their full potential on state & high school exit and college entrance exams. Schools can easily facilitate admissions and transfers with our electronic transcript exchange.
College & Career Planning Help your students create personalized plans to realize their goals. Bridges highly effective college and career planning programs help you motivate more students towards success. Expand student awareness and enthusiasm for career and education possibilities. An engaging online education and career exploration system, Choices Explorer provides extensive libraries of original education, career and recreation articles in an interactive, easy-to-read magazine-style format. Personalize planning for more meaningful results. Choices Planner is a comprehensive online career information delivery system that helps students to build personal plans as they compare, connect and choose from a vast network of career and education options. * CD version is available
Motivate Students for Success Excite students about their future with engaging education and career exploration tools Inspire students to pursue more rigorous courses and achieve academic success. Choices Explorer adds relevance to the classroom experience with original content and thousands of activities that tie academics to occupational pursuits, integrated with Career Clusters. Open the door to a new world of opportunity with hundreds of profiles on non-traditional and student-requested careers. Uniquely engaging, Choices Explorer gives students firsthand insight on college life and the working world. All work is automatically saved in individual online portfolios, enabling a smooth transition from exploration to planning for sites with access to both Choices Explorer and Choices Planner. Easily increase program effectiveness and save time with online professional resources, including ready-made lesson plans and activities, tools for involving parents, and the transition planning guide with recommended Individualized Education Program (IEP) statements for students with special needs. Choices Explorer also supports the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) by complying with the Rehabilitation Act, Section 508. Professional Tools Accountability reporting tools Portfolio Finder Send reminders Site administration Lesson plans and activities Portfolio Management Track Guideways Customize course plans Track portfolios and guideways * More information on page 21
Portfolio Learn All About You Things You ve Saved Your Activities Your Journal * More information on page 20 340+ post-secondary programs Succeeding in high school guide Preparing for college guide Major Finder quiz Majors by school subject Getting Ready for College blogs Work 950+ career profiles 450+ career videos 225+ Spanish career videos Real-life expert interviews Real-life activities Career Clusters and Pathway Profiles Cluster Finder Career Finder quiz Careers by school subject Going to Work articles Word on the Street blogs Life Volunteer articles Recreation ideas Volunteering advice Recreation experts Q & A Choices Regional Reporter Add-On Effortlessly measure student progress and report program success across your state or district with Choices Regional Reporter. * More information on page 54
WINNER OF: smooth transition from exploration to planning. Achievement Starts with a Plan Compare, connect and choose education and career options for more powerful plans Ensure every student is wellprepared for higher education and the world of work. Choices Planner enables more meaningful planning by connecting students to multiple research-based valid assessments and a comprehensive network of school, program and career profiles integrated with Career Clusters. Students can easily identify how their interests, values and skills relate to their best options for more meaningful plans in English and Spanish. Self-directed and easy to use, Choices Planner s Guideways and Career Plan Builder make personalized planning more effective than ever before. All work is automatically saved in each student s online portfolio, which provides a common platform with Choices Explorer, facilitating a Include more students with Choices Planner. Give greater access to visually-impaired students through screen reader compatible features and text, receive recommended Individual Education Program (IEP) statements in the Transition Planning Guide document, and support the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) with Rehabilitation Act, Section 508 compliance. *CD version is available Work 670+ O*NET occupation profiles Career Finder Compare Careers Work Values Sorter Transferable Skills Checklist Interest Profiler Spanish Interest Profiler Workplace Skills Checklist 630+ career videos 230+ Spanish career videos Resume Builder Job Interview Practice Cover Letter Creator Thank-You Letter Builder
Learn Your Portfolio 8000+ colleges, technical schools, and graduate schools 1000+ college, job bank, and financial aid links School Finder Compare Schools Scholarship Finder High School Planning Course Plan Builder Career Pathways Related Careers Related Programs Professional Tools All About You Things You ve Saved Your Journal Your Activities Your Plans *More information on page 20 Choices Regional Reporter Add-On Effortlessly measure student progress and report program success across your state or district with Choices Regional Reporter. * More information on page 54 Accountability reporting tools Portfolio Finder Send reminders Site administration Lesson plans and activities Manage course plans Track portfolios and Guideways * More information on page 21 Ability Profiler Add-On Help all students realize their full potential for education and career options with this online aptitude assessment. * More information on page 23
KEY COMPONENTS OF CHOICES PLANNER & EXPLORER Your Portfolio Meaningful Planning for Students Valuable Insight for Professionals The most integral component of Bridges Choices Explorer and Choices Planner solutions, Your Portfolio provides students with a common platform where they can securely record and store all their planning efforts. Your Portfolio empowers students to make a seamless transition from exploring all their options with Choices Explorer in middle school to building meaningful plans with Choices Planner in high school, post-secondary, and beyond. All work is automatically saved, allowing students to review and revise their plans year after year. Your Portfolio for Choices Explorer & Choices Planner includes All About You Getting Ready to Work activities Assessment and Quiz results Personal Information Things You Saved Career Options High School Course Plans Post-Secondary Programs and Majors Post-Secondary Schools Post-Secondary Schools You Already Applied To Scholarship and Financial Aid Recreation Ideas Volunteering Opportunities Buzz Articles Your Plans Career Plan Builder Your School Course Plans Course Plan Builder Your Courses Your Activities National Guideways Files and Attachments Links Your Journal Write about career and education plans, reflections about the past, and dreams for the future.
KEY COMPONENTS OF CHOICES PLANNER & EXPLORER Professional Tools Valuable data and resources to achieve school-wide success Maximize the value of Choices Explorer and Choices Planner when you take advantage of your Professional Tools. Accountability reporting tools and statistics help you easily make effective data-driven decisions as you measure student plans and report your success. Resource Library: Make the most out of Choices Explorer and Choices Planner. Find lesson plans, activities, white papers, and support tools right at your fingertips. Site Administration: Personalize the planning experience with the flexibility to change settings and content, including the management of professional accounts. If duplicate portfolios have been created you can use the Merge Portfolios function to combine portfolios. When students leave school, professionals can choose to delete and release their portfolios. The Site Administration section also offers the added security to change your site password as well as grant or revoke Professional Tools access. Reviewer: View the contents of each portfolio just like the user sees them. Professionals have the ability to add comments to portfolios or use the Portfolio Finder to build lists of portfolios that match selected criteria. The Send Reminder tool allows you to send reminders to specific classes or everyone at your site. Manage portfolios by creating groups and locking or batch printing course plans. When students change schools, professionals can easily move individuals or a group of portfolios to a different school. Reporter: Effortlessly generate usage or outcome-based reports. Usage reports will show the number of sessions, page views, portfolios created, and active portfolios in the current school year or in a specific grad year. Outcome-based reports can be created based on your selection from a large suite of standard reports. Comparison reports allow you to create reports which break down the results by gender, ethnicity, class/grad year or specified group. Tracker: Access real-time activity and tracking reports. Track user progress through Choices Planner s Guideways by seeing which activities they ve already finished and which they have left to complete in order to meet their specified objectives. The Tracker also works as an accountability tool, allowing you keep track of the portfolios you have reviewed or assessed using the Reviewer.
Assessments & Inventories Empower your students with greater knowledge about their personal aptitudes, personality types, and unique learning styles. Bridges assessments and inventories give students an accurate picture of themselves, enhancing the quality of their college and career plans. Help every student realize their true potential for specific education and career options. The Ability Profiler online aptitude assessment integrates with Choices Planner and Choices CD Edition to measure students strengths and provide occupational leads. Enable students to make more informed decisions about their future. Based on the proven science of personality type, Do What You Are is an online self-discovery assessment that improves students selfawareness about their unique personality for more effective planning. Boost student achievement in your school. Bridges Learning Style Inventory identifies students preferred learning environments, helping them build self-awareness and improve study habits, attitudes and behavior, to increase performance in all areas of their education.
Help Them Discover Their Potential Discover new insights about aptitude strengths and related occupations Easy-to-understand results quickly identify student potential for specific career and education options by highlighting their strengths, occupations that match their strengths, and areas in which they may want to expand their training. Empower students with new insights about themselves with the Ability Profiler, a computeradministered assessment adapted from the latest paper-based O*NET Ability Profiler. Available only as an add-on assessment for Choices Planner and Choices CD, the Ability Profiler defines the relevance between aptitude scores and the world of work based on information about job aptitude requirements from the U.S. Department of Labor. On-screen directions and testtaking hints make the program easy to use, allowing students to work independently with minimal assistance. Raw scores from the mark-making and dexterity board exercises can be manually entered to provide a more comprehensive view of a student s abilities. You get a printed profile of test results immediately. Multi-Aptitude Ability Assessment Arithmetic Reasoning Vocabulary Three-Dimensional Space Computation Name Comparison Object Matching Professional Tools Administration Guide Technical Guide
Matching Personality to Work Achievement Quickly improve every student s education and career plans with the proven science of personality type communication, learning styles, social situations, and relationship strategies. Results are securely delivered to counselors and students via e-mail. Students can choose to share their results with parents, who may also benefit from a better understanding of their personality type. Proven effective, the Do What You Are self-discovery assessment is based on the science of personality type. Engaging and insightful, Do What You Are presents students with hypothetical scenarios and asks them to identify which description best represents their personality. Empower students to make more informed decisions about their future with detailed information about their unique strengths, blind spots, recommended career paths and college majors, as well as tips for conducting an effective career search. Professional Tools Personality Type Handbook Psychometric properties report Complete Personality Profile: Realistic scenarios Recommended career paths and college majors Career search tips Career satisfiers Strengths and blind spots Interpersonal negotiating styles Confidential reports provide useful insight on how to best work with each student. Students completed personality profiles identify their preferences in
Maximize the Potential of Every High School Student Unlike standard paper-based assessments, the online LSI provides instant individual and class reports offering insight into 22 preferences and strategies. Learning style reports help include more parents in the student achievement progress. Support student achievement with valuable insight about their unique learning styles Higher achievement is within reach. Bridges online Learning Style Inventory (LSI) helps improve student self-awareness, study habits, attitudes and behavior, increasing overall achievement in all areas of their education and boosting self-esteem through more successful learning. Originally developed by Dunn, Dunn and Price and backed by over 30 years of extensive research, Bridges online LSI is the most-used learning style inventory in the education community to increase test scores and aid underachieving students to get back on track. The Learning Style Inventory analyzes 22 different preferences in the areas of: Immediate environment (sound, heat, light and design) Emotionality (motivation, responsibility, persistence and structure) Sociological needs (self-oriented, peer-oriented, adult-oriented, or combined ways) Physical needs (perceptual preference(s), time of day, food intake, and mobility)
Helping kids make sound decisions. That s Vinita Long s goal. She is a career resource administrator at Columbus High School in Mississippi. Many students at Columbus face the challenges of poverty and broken family relationships. Over 50 percent of the school population qualifies for free or reduced-cost lunches. Long uses Choices Planner to help her students realize the possibilities life holds for everyone. With the help of Choices Planner, Long guides her students as they create meaningful plans for their post-secondary life. The students consider their interests and work values to research possible careers, then look into training or license requirements for the careers they re interested in. Through Choices Planner, they can explore careers they may not have considered before and make decisions based on their own priorities. It s not my job to twist arms. I help put information in front of students and parents to help the student come to sensible decisions about work, says Long. It s important to help them become aware that there are more careers out there The nature of [Choices Planner] engages almost every student than a doctor, veterinarian or professional athlete. Choices Planner includes comprehensive tools and information for all of this and more. Bridges Transitions worked with the Mississippi Department of Education to create tools to help students meet Mississippi s state-mandated career-guidance goals, through a customized set of Guideways for Grades 9 through 12. Long helps each of Columbus 1,400 students complete the Guideways. That might sound like a daunting job, but Long says students are easily drawn into it. The nature of the activities engages almost every student says Long. There are few to no discipline problems. Long works with English teachers to get time with the students for the Guideways. With the Grade 10 students, the English teachers give her half their classes over two days. The students complete their required Guideways, and the English teachers give grades to the students for their career work. Helping her students plan goals is going to get even easier for Long. Her next incoming class will already have Choices portfolios when they arrive at her school. This will save her hours of work transferring files, which means that her students can jump right into their work. It s the best thing since sliced bread, says Long. Long finds inspiration and meaning in her work with the students. If I can help flip the switch for one or two students in a year, my existence will be purposeful, says Long. We all need to be doing something. CASE STUDIES
3534 Hayden Avenue Culver City, CA 90232 1-800-281-1168 sales@xap.com corp.xap.com www.bridges.com Bridges and designs are trademarks of Bridges Transitions Inc., used under license by Bridges Transitions Co. Choices is a registered trademark of Canada Employment Insurance Commission and is used under license by Bridges Transitions Co. Paws in Jobland is a trademark of Studie og Erhverv International ApS and is used under license by Bridges Transitions Co. Do What You Are is a registered trademark of Paul D. Tieger and Barbara Barron and is distributed by Bridges Transitions Co. The Learning Style Inventory is an unregistered trademark of Price Systems Inc., and is distributed by Bridges Transitions Co. SAT and PSAT/NMSQT are registered trademarks of The College Examination Board. ACT is a registered trademark of ACT, Inc. testgear, is a registered trademark of Bridges Transitions Inc., used under license by Bridges Transitions Co. Xap Online Applications, Xap Transcript Exchange, and Reach Farther are trademarks of Xap Corporation. Copyright 2009 Bridges Transitions Inc., a Xap Corporation company. All rights reserved.