The benefits of using resources from Bridges continue to grow this year with many exciting enhancements to Choices® Planner. We have introduced several new key features for this school year.
What's New (for High School)
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Every year Bridges enhances Choices Planner with great new features to reflect customer requests and the latest data updates. The latest enhancements designed to empower you and your students with the best possible product experience are:

As of Winter 2008:

• Customize Course Plans
  Found in the Site Administration section of your Professional Tools, now you can adapt the standard course plans in Choices Planner to match your school courses. Create a template and then take advantage of the copy ability that allows you to easily build multiple recommended course plans for various career clusters and pathways. You may also add graduation requirements to help your students plan accordingly.

As of Fall 2007:

• Career Cluster Functionality
  
  • Browse by Career Clusters — Replacing the current career zones, Career Clusters will become the primary structure for browsing careers as well as programs and majors.
  • Search Using Career Clusters — The Career Finder in Choices Planner will continue to include a search characteristic for Career Clusters that can be combined with other factors such as education and earnings to build lists of suggested careers.
  • Cluster Finder — The Cluster Finder will allow students to find clusters that may be appropriate for them.
  • Career Cluster and Pathway Profiles — All references to Career Clusters and Pathways in Choices Planner will be linked to new profiles for the Cluster or Pathway. Using the same format as Choices career and college profiles, the new Career Cluster and Pathways profiles will include a description of the cluster or pathways, lists of related careers, and lists of related programs/majors.
  • Plan High School Courses — The High School Course Plan Builder will be enhanced to offer a Career Cluster starting point for students. Course plan templates for each Career Cluster will be offered to students for use in constructing their own personal course plan.
  • Career Clusters in Portfolios — Students will be able to store Career Clusters and Pathways of interest in their Choices portfolios. These could be Clusters and Pathways from the results of the Cluster Finder or identified through exploration. Saved Clusters can then be used in the High School Course Plan Builder and the Career Plan Builder.
• Attach Documents to Your Portfolio
  Now Choices Planner users will be able to attach documents into the Your Activities section of their portfolio. Enabling easy access online anytime, anywhere, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations or any other file type up to 5MB in size can be stored in Your Portfolio -- to a maximum total capacity of 30MB. Professionals have the power to review user's attachments and delete any content deemed inappropriate.
• New Professional Reports
  Empowering greater insight into your students' planning progress, ten new reporting functions will be added to the Reporter section of your Professional Tools. Now professionals can review and report on: saved colleges, saved programs, colleges applied to, FAFSA submissions, completed resumes, completed interviews, completed cover letters, saved scholarships, number of attached documents, and active portfolios by graduation year.
• Portfolio Names Column
  Easily assist students who have forgotten their portfolio name. When browsing class lists in the Reviewer section of your Professional Tools, professionals will have the ability to quickly identify a student's portfolio name in the new Portfolio Name column.
• Forgot Your Password Retrieval
  Further enhancing portfolio security, a new password retrieval process is being put into effect. Now when a student forgets their password, they can either request that it be e-mailed to the address provided in their personal portfolio or to the holder of a Professional Account, who can then provide it to them. If they choose, professionals have the ability to opt-out from being e-mailed students' passwords.
• Interest Profiler Usability
  Now students can move through the 180 question assessment faster and easier than before. Without sacrificing any of the validity, the Interest Profiler has been redesigned to include only three preference options — Like, Not Sure, Dislike — removing Love and No Way from the original five options.
• Change Schools
  Making it easier for graduating classes to be moved from middle school to high school, the Change Schools feature, found in the Reviewer section of your Professional Tools, allows educators to move students to another school by using the other school’s site id and password. This tool only allows educators to move a student OUT of their school. Educators cannot import students into their school. Additionally, Professionals can also choose to move their account to a different site. Simply go to the Edit Professional Account Information link in your Professional Tools, and Change Schools.
• New Occupation Profiles
  To reflect the ever-changing job market, Choices Planner undergoes regular data updates to provide the most current information available, helping to ensure education and career plans are as accurate as possible. The following list of occupation profiles will be added to Choices Planner:
  • Massage Therapist
  • Skin Care Specialists
  • Producer
  • Singer
  • Court Reporter
  • Gaming Surveillance Officer/Investigator
  • Computer Software Application Engineer
  • Multi-Media Artist/ Animator
  • Nanny
  • Rehabilitation Counselor
  • Team Assembler