WISE

Server downtime 5pm-6pm Jan 21 2009

On January 21, WISE's network will be unavailable from 5pm-6pm PST for scheduled upgrades and maintenance.

User Support problems

We apologize that we have not been able to respond to 'Contact Us' for the past week. Due to server problems at the university, we have not received your request. This should be fixed within the next day or two, so please contact us again. WISE Team

Thanks for a great year!

WISE would like to thank the thousands of students and teachers who participated in WISE projects this year. We had over 35,000 new student accounts since the first of September. We do appreciate the feedback we get from teachers about what a great job their students are doing when using one of our projects and we look forward to your continued participation next year. We are continuing to develop the new WISE 3.0 which should be available in the early fall. WISE Team

Bookmark wise.berkeley.edu

Please note that all WISE bookmarked pages should be set to wise.berkeley.edu. For the next 4 to 5 weeks this url will redirect you to wise-demo.berkeley.edu which will provide a faster and more reliable sever connection. Previous links such as wise-dev.berkeley.edu should not be used.

Brief Server Down Time

WISE will be unavailable from 2:45pm-4:30pm PST on Friday, December 14, 2007. WISE will be migrating to another host. Data will not be saved during this time.

Good News!

The server down time scheduled for Monday December 3 has been canceled. We are planning to have our server moved to a managed building in the near future which should eliminate problems such as this.

Server Down Time

Due to electrical upgrading in the building that houses our server it will be unavailable from 3:30 AM to 8:30 AM PST on Monday Nov. 26 and Monday Dec. 3 We are very sorry for the inconvenience this may cause for you.

WISE Server Downtime!

WISE will be migrating our server on October 18 and 19. you should expect service to be unavilable starting 3pm PDT on October 18 and all day on October 19.

New Projects Available

Two new projects have been added to the Technology Enhanced Learning in Science library, "Global Warming: Virtual Earth" and "Modeling Static Electricity". The Global Warming project is primarily designed for grades 6-8 and contains some great new models. The Static Electricity project is designed for grades 9-12.

NSTA: St Louis

We are looking forward to the NSTA conferece in St. Louis.Drop by our sessions on Friday March 30 we would enjoy meeting you.We will be in Majestic A at the Renaissance Grand Hotel from 12:30 to 1:30 PM

What Teachers Say About WISE

"As a teacher, there is nothing better than seeing and feeling the excitement of a studentâs discovery process ignited. Utilizing this technology has helped me to grow as a teacher." Priscilla Robinson, middle school science teacher. "My students respond well to how these projects visualize complex scientific processes, and they appreciate the projects' relevancy to current controversies and health-related issues." Kathy Benemann, high school biology teacher "The Wise projects have added a spark to my curriculum, a change from the traditional 'read a chapter, take notes' format." Ellen Fasman, high school biology teacher "WISE has been a very effective and outstanding addition to my classroom teaching. The highly motivating programs have provided meaningful and practical answers to science questions that have always mystified my students. My students have made the important connections to big ideas and show a true, deeper understanding of the concepts. Every school science program should complement instruction with the power of WISE." Tom Castro, middle school earth science teacher "My students are more engaged and help each other learn challenging concepts such as genetics and evolution." David Mathers, high school biology teacher

California Science Teachers Conference

Three of the teachers who have run TELS/WISE projects in their classrooms share their successes in three separate sessions at the California Science Teachers Conference. Thanks Priscilla Robinson, Tom Castro and Lauren Nourse you did a great job!

REMINDER! Detach students from last year

Welcome back to a new school year. This is just a reminder that if you ran a WISE module last school year you will need to detach your previous students before you set up new classes. You do this by going to View My Students and clicking on the detach button.

WISE scheduled downtime

WISE will be transitioning to a new server some time soon. We expect it will be between the Tuesdays July 18 and July 25. We will post again here the day before going down.

Refreshing

We've added some new features to the grading system. If your browser has trouble with them, first try refreshing the page while holding shift. Holding down the Shift key tells your browser that you want it to download new instructions that it might assume it has already.

Temporary error in creating accounts

Around noon (Pacific time) on Tuesday Jan 3 the server WISE runs on received a timed update to a component it depends on. This introduced a problem in the creation of teacher accounts, which now has been solved. If you created an account during this period, please try again. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Representative George Miller meets with WISE and TELS

Congressman Miller attended Martinez Junior High School. On October 14th he came to Berkeley and met with 6 students and teacher Priscilla Robinson from his alma mater to hear how science is taught today. As the students said, "With WISE, we learn more and we are more interested in science." Miller has championed innovation in education and fought tirelessly for improved public education.

Simpler signup process

It's now easier than ever to join WISE.

National Teacher Day

On National Teacher Day WISE would like to recognize the hundreds of great teachers who are dedicated to challenging students with science inquiry projects. We know that your hard work and dedication is a key to student learning. We greatly appreciate your role in our growing the WISE community.

New projects from TELS

Our TELS family of projects is growing. Check out what is new in the WISE Library of projects. We would welcome feedback if you use one of these new projects with your students.

New server and new look!

When we decided to upgrade our server we thought to also update our look. The server upgrade is now complete and with it we offer a new front page to WISE. We'll be gradually updating the look and feel of other parts of the site. Keep an eye out!

WISE remembers you

The login screen now prefills the "username" field with the last successful login from your computer. This is only for non-student accounts.

New Curriculum added from TELS center

A new family of Web-based inquiry projects has been developed by the TELS. We invite you to explore the new family of projects

Intermittent service Dec 25-30

We plan to take advantage of the lull in use of WISE during the last week of the year to complete the transition to an automatic failover system. Service may come and go during this time.

Database upgrade difficulties

As part of our transition to an automatic failover system, we had to upgrade the database software. We did this last Friday night and handled the fallout over the weekend. Users who logged in during that time may have had trouble with their passwords.

WISE Educator Honored

Mr. Earl Walls was honored with the 2004 Prudential Foundation Fellowship for outstanding contributions to education. Here he is pictured with Ms. Michelle Williams who nominated him for the award. Mr. Walls uses WISE projects in his fifth grade classroom.