** Using WeBWorK **

Joseph Morse, Lori Johnson and I held an outreach workshop as part of the Kansas City Regional Math Tech Expo at the University of Missouri Kansas City on October 8th. (http://kcmathtechexpo.org/)

The KC Math Tech Expo is an annual event held in early October every year. If you're reading this, the expo would probably interest you very much. This year, for example,

• MAA President Paul Zorn gave the keynote presentation,
  
• Kelly Cline gave an invited address on " Active Learning with Clickers and Classroom Voting"(http://mathquest.carroll.edu/resources.html), and
  
• Andy Bennett spoke on "Touchable Math with HTML5"

There were also excellent talks on many other math tech stuff - geogebra, webassign, etc. (And, as a member of the organizing committee I invite you to please consider attending, or even better, giving a presentation)

There were two webwork talks -

• Joseph Morse from Winnetonka High School in KC gave a presentation "Implementing WeBWorK in the Dual Credit High School Environment" on Fri Oct 7, and
  
• me, Joe and Lori Johnson conducted a webwork outreach session on Saturday.

Joe's talk on Friday was absolutely fantastic, but I'll let him say something about that and we'll post a link to his slides when they are available.

The outreach session was scheduled for 1hr 45min, and 17 people besides the three of us were there. I gave the presentation while Joe and Lori helped participants with questions and added their own comments and suggestions.

For the presentation I used the same slides that Mike May, Anneke Bart and I used when we gave an outreach session last April. I went like this:

• WeBWorK: What, Why? (30min)
  • Key features, testimonials
  • Who uses WeBWorK?
  • AMS Homework Software Survey

• Hands on "Play" time (guided WeBWorK exploration, 45 min)
• How to get your own WeBWorK course, further resources (15min)
• Workshop survey (15min)
  

In the outreach session last April, I realized that the participants were getting sort of bored and antsy during the first part of the session. So, I started it by having everyone log into webwork as students so that they would explore the student interface and work problems while I was giving the overview. That worked out pretty well I think. Then during the regularly scheduled hands on time I had them log in as instructors and we spent that time entirely in the instructor interface.

Overall, I think it was a very much a success - everyone seemed very enthusiastic, and asked a lot of questions. And, I think nearly everyone also filled out the post-session survey!

Jason