When I Grow Up
Life skills and career guidance software
By Russell Smith
Software programs that help students learn how to resolve conflicts
peacefully or that help them find a suitable career path haven't
yet made a sizable impression on the buying habits of most school
districts. When it comes to software purchases, many districts
would rather spend money on software that prepares students for
state tests. Yet life skills and career guidance software hold
the promise of being very useful in solving behavioral problems
and helping determine a student's aptitude for adult careers.
For this review, Electronic School contacted a number of vendors
and found a wide range in the quality of available software products.
Many of the companies have been in the business for decades, selling
traditional printed materials and video clips. Making the move
to a software product appears to have been, in some cases, a tough
transition. Nonetheless, many companies are producing quality
software in this field, so do your research and try before you
buy.
Life skills software
Social learning programs are very popular these days in the
wake of a high-profile year of student violence. Administrators
now have to deal with not only the traditional 3 Rs, but also
a fourth: rage.
Social learning programs used to consist mostly of high-dollar
instructional videos, which tended to have a limited impact on
students because they were not interactive. The video format is
still an integral part of the new social learning curriculum,
but when video clips are layered into an interactive CD-ROM, the
opportunity for effective instruction increases exponentially.
With the advent of cheap multimedia computers, social learning
software can be used in many types of classrooms and instructional
settings.
Two really innovative programs are head and shoulders above
the rest of the pack for life skills software: The Coolien Challenge
and Relate for Teens.
 The
Coolien Challenge 
EDR Media. (216) 292-7300. Ages
12-18. The Coolien Challenge is a well-done conflict-reduction
program and should be part of the software repertoire of every
secondary school counselor and health teacher in America. The
software's game-based structure is innovative: To qualify for
membership in a special society, an alien from a nonviolent planet
(a Coolien) must enlist an Earthling (the student) to help prevent
violence in an Earth school for one day.
QuickTime movie sequences of confrontational events in the school
day give students insight into the dynamics of school conflicts.
Students have to make choices along the way, and a narrator explains
why things aren't always what they seem to be.
In one scene, a youngster nearly comes to blows in the cafeteria
line because a fellow student makes fun of his shirt. In another
sequence, a boy fails to hear another student talking to him,
which results in another potentially serious situation that is
then examined from all angles. Students are likely to find that
these scenarios ring true.
Developed with funding from the National Institute of Mental
Health, the program is based on research conducted by mental health
specialists at Applewood Centers, Inc., in Cleveland, Ohio. Applewood
Project Manager Joella Burgoon told Electronic School that she
hopes the availability of antiviolence computer games will create
a new section on computer software store shelves. "There are thousands
of games about blowing people up," she said. "We're trying to
go in another direction."
The Coolien Challenge ($89 for a single user; $440 for a site
license) is a two-disc set that will keep students engaged for
hours of learning activities. About its only drawback is that
the audio and video portions of some movie segments are occasionally
unsynchronized, but this is a minor cosmetic flaw. The social
skills segments are videoscripted to be believable to students,
and they contain thoughtful suggestions about courses of action
and their consequences. Although the program is not as full-featured
as the more costly Relate for Teens (see below), its elegant simplicity
helps students stay on task.
Relate
for Teens 
Ripple Effects. (888)
259-6618. Secondary students. Relate for Teens, a set of three
CD-ROMs, can be installed in three different configurations, from
a minor hard drive requirement of less than 40 MB to a full install
of slightly over 1GB of storage space. The full install is the
most convenient option, as it doesn't require the insertion of
any of the discs to see the frequent video clips.
This powerful program has an extremely large database (600 topics)
of social issues, including family violence, curfew, divorce,
dress code, and alcoholism. A password-protected interface allows
students to use the program confidentially. Less-proficient readers
can listen as student narrators read text sections. A dynamic
diary shaped like a brain allows users to input notes and keep
track of important concepts. The program is expensive, however,
with a single-user license going for $1,199 and a site license
priced at $4,799.
Relate for Teens includes an easy-to-use hyperlink that takes
users to the Ripple Effects web site, where the company provides
free access to two online modules: (1) an Online School Safety
Profiler that allows students and adults to fill out an anonymous
web survey on safety and health issues, and (2) Relate for Teens
Online, a sampling of some of the social issues found on the CD-ROM.
Career guidance software
CareerScope:
Career Assessment and Reporting System
Vocational Research Institute.
(800) 874-5387. Ages 14-adult. CareerScope's new 3.0 version is
an excellent example of innovative assessment and aptitude software.
Admittedly, it's expensive ($3,000 for a site license), but it's
well worth the money. CareerScope contains a comprehensive computer
assessment and is geared to modern skills and job interests.
Students who take the self-administered assessments can print
out the resulting interest inventory. This inventory provides
user-friendly score displays and contains career recommendations
that focus on the students' measured aptitudes and most significant
areas of interest.
Another useful tool is a counselor's report, generated on request
by counselors or administrators. This report presents a three-page,
concise printout of the viable career directions for that student.
As in the student's report, there is a complete record of the
scores on the aptitude tests.
Encyclopedia
of Careers and Vocational Guidance
Ferguson Publishing Company.
(312) 692-1000. Ages 14-adult. This resource is a great
idea -- a large database of 1,500 occupations -- that unfortunately
suffers from a clunky browser interface. With fewer than 100 video
clips and a paucity of web hyperlinks, this encyclopedia fails
to live up to its multimedia potential.
Even so, the software does have some useful features, such as
a large military occupation database and a career guidance section
with information on assessment, interviewing, resumes, and job
search techniques. For the price ($159), the program might meet
the needs of some school districts, but it would be a much better
buy at, say, $30.
Interviews
Education Associates.
(502) 227-4783. Ages 14-adult. This program -- one in a series
of nine CD-ROMs on job readiness skills -- has some useful tips
on interviews, but it is extremely sparse for a CD-ROM format.
(The entire disc has less than 6MB of data, which represents only
1 percent of the capacity of a CD-ROM.) I suspect this is an old
software series on floppy disks being ported over to CD-ROM. This
disc costs $129, but in my opinion is worth far less.
Learning
& Working Styles Inventory
Piney Mountain Press.
(800) 255-3127. Ages 14-adult. On a scale of 1 to 10, this program
rates dead last for creativity and user interaction. In my opinion,
it has very limited benefit to students. The Learning & Working
Styles Inventory ($195 for CD-ROM and manual) asks 75 questions,
several repeated, about how students perceive their learning and
working abilities. After the student has completed the inventory,
the program scores the survey for the instructor. The instructor
section includes explanations of the scores and opportunities
to provide feedback to the student, but these features are simplistic
and much too general to be useful.
ResumeMaker
Deluxe 7.0 and ResumeMaker
with Career Planning
Individual Software.
(800) 822-3522. Ages 14-adult. Windows only. ResumeMaker Deluxe
is the 800-pound gorilla of resume software. For the price ($50)
and features, it's pretty hard to justify buying any other resume
software.
The program helps users create traditional and electronic resumes
for a variety of careers and lets them post resumes online and
search for jobs that match their specified criteria. It searches
the Internet's top career sites and resume banks as well as the
online classified ads of more than 90 major U.S. newspapers, giving
students a first-hand look at what awaits them in the exciting
virtual job market on the Internet.
The software also contains hundreds of sample cover and follow-up
letters, as well as tips on interviewing and salary negotiation,
and a contact manager to keep the job search organized. The process
of writing a resume is made simple with a fill-in-the-blank format.
One hundred thousand pre-written resume phrases for more than
12,000 careers and a thesaurus containing 3,600 action words help
novice resume writers create a professional document.
ResumeMaker's Job Finder feature connects directly to the top
20 career web sites, searching nearly 5 million job openings across
the United States. It then displays a list of job openings that
meet the user's criteria. A Virtual Interview feature with video
clips lets users practice their answers to 500 possible interview
questions, explains the reasoning behind each question, and shows
them how to respond more effectively. An Expert Advice feature
provides tips on career planning, salary negotiation, job search
techniques, interviewing, job benefits, resume writing, and cover
letter writing.
An alternative is ResumeMaker with Career Planning ($30), which
provides an almost identical resume development guide, contact
manager, and springboard to Internet job listings. But in place
of the expert advice on a range of job-hunting topics, it offers
KAPLAN's Career Counselor, a comprehensive guide to choosing a
career direction. Highly detailed information and videos on 12,700
careers are helpful for researching career options and identifying
the job-related skills and training required.
WinWay
Resume 6.0
WinWay Corporation. (800)
4-WINWAY. Ages 14-adult. Windows only. Even though ResumeMaker
is pretty hard to beat, WinWay Resume has some features worth
looking at. If you're going to teach resume skills to high school
students, you should get all the decent software you can find
-- and for $40, you'll find this program is well worth the money.
WinWay also makes effective use of video clips from career experts.
A virtual career counselor offers excellent advice on finding
and getting a job, including how to avoid the "deadly dozen resume
mistakes." Users will learn how to negotiate salary offers by
viewing an interactive virtual interview in full-motion video.
There are lots of good tips about tough interview questions as
well as suggestions for key questions to ask the job interviewer.
I also like the clean-cut resume interface with easy access
to sample resumes. Users can post resumes to online databases
and instantly access current job openings from employers nationwide.
They can also convert resumes and cover letters to three popular
career formats: HTML for the web, ASCII for plain text, or RTF
for generic formatted text. There's even a function to print an
envelope marked "Urgent" or "Resume Enclosed."
Caveat emptor
The life skills and career guidance software market is clearly
somewhat immature. Quite a number of programs I looked at for
this review were of so poor quality that I wouldn't recommend
them to any school district -- a far greater proportion than I
have found in any other category of software. Poorly made software
will simply gather dust on the shelf in the counselor's office,
so it is imperative that you ask vendors to provide trial previews
-- without any obligation to purchase. If it's lousy stuff, send
it back. Try before you buy, and you'll maximize every dollar
in your software budget.
Russell Smith
is a contributing editor to Electronic School and an educational
technology consultant for Region 14 education Service Center in
Abilene, Texas.
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