We had originally planned a salary search feature and also a salary rating for each career. However after fine tuning the WIRL Career philosophy and taking into account best practices in career education it was decided to not to include salary information in the WIRL Career resource. Best practices and research into career planning clearly demonstrate that the primary gauge for career success and motivation is a love for the actual work rather then salary. Salary information is easily accessible from other resources including the DEWR job outlook webpage.
A WIRL Career segment is not designed to cover a whole career or industry. It's a snapshot through the eyes of a young person beginning their own career. The driving idea behind the resource is to open the eyes of a young person as to what a career is really like and what range of careers are available. It's like having a good friend sit down with you and explain what a career is really like.
A WIRL segment is designed to be a positive but realistic look at a career through the eyes of a young person. Segments are designed to be positive and informative but not overly glossy.
As a career adviser you can use WIRL Career in a number of ways. Firstly you could provide school login details to your students and have them explore in their own time (even at home).
You could also use WIRL Career as a starting point to generate an assignment where students can research into a number of careers potentially writing a summary or presenting their findings back to the class.
You could use WIRL in a one on one session with students to help them begin exploring and to show them a few segments in which they might be interested.
You could also have students look at WIRL in a class or lab setting where they can explore for themselves during a period. The number of simultaneous connects will depend on your network capability so you might want to check this out. But if worse comes to worse you could have students sit in groups and work together.
In producing these segments we have endeavoured to established a gender balance. However the gender of those profiled in these segments should not be seen as representative of that career.
In producing this resource we didn’t want to use actors but wanted to profile young people in their own workplace. Many of the young people profiled have won awards and been recognised by their respective industries. It is a privilege to access many of these work environments for filming and we feel that this is a more compelling experience rather than seeing young people in a boring studio.
Aside from the segment design we also recognised that one of the biggest challenges for career advisers is maintaining the attention of young people. Even a twenty minute DVD or video can be too long. WIRL segments are designed to be short sharp and flow quickly. Since young people tend to switch off when looking at profiles of people too far distant in age it was also important that we profiled young people in their twenties and early twenties where possible.
Your subscription gives you an unlimited licence to use WIRL Career. You can even give out the school login for students to use at home. However the resource is subject to a fair usage policy so that no-one goes to download heaven. That said, under normal usage there will be no problem.
You should also remember that using this resource will also require bandwidth at your end as well. Schools are charged for this bandwidth from their IT providers. Depending on who pays the bills you may need to allow a couple of hundred dollars to cover the annual bandwidth.
From our end WIRL segments are streamed perfectly. If for some reason you cannot see the video segments or have any other related IT issues then print this information sheet for your IT support.
Download quotas are used by IT teams to control internet usage and to put the onus back on to the users at a school to manage their own internet use. The daily or weekly download limit is set in accordance with a school policy and monitored using a software program.
Moving forward more and more education resources will be delivered online which is a good thing because it means that education resources are starting to keep pace with the rest of the world. These resources will increasingly incorporate rich media (like WIRL Career) which is heavier on internet usage but keep in mind this is what the internet was invented for in the first place. So the ideal solution to any internet quota issue is to increase the limit in recognition of these new resources.
However changing these limits can become quite a saga at some schools so here’s a couple of 'work arounds'.
Firstly the WIRL Career website and our streaming server can be added to a download exceptions list within the monitoring software so that downloads from this specific site aren’t included in the daily quota. (Contact WIRL for exception location details)
The next solution is to create a single specific career account that students can login to when they need to look at a media rich resource like this. That way the downloads are associated with this account rather than the students own accounts. The quota for this account can be set much larger to account for the usage. This account can be limited to career specific sites like WIRL Career to ensure that this account is not abused.
The ground is now changing rapidly in regards to broadband delivery. Even since we began this project 18 months ago the ground has moved significantly. Broadband usage has increased by 300 percent over the last few years but what is even more amazing it that ADSL 2+ is now available and is being rolled out across the country. This can reach speeds of 24 mbs. So let me translate what this mean to you...
As mentioned WIRL is dependent or your school's bandwidth. Because bandwidth is limited we have encoded the video files to a smaller size so they fit down the internet pipe. This means that the quality and size you view them onscreen is different then the DVD demo. But consider this ! But with ADSL 2+ now being adopted around the country it means that your school will be able to watch the segments at much better quality and on many more similtanous computers. Your IT department will know more or click here for some more background.
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