Hot Potatoes

Hot Potatoes

This is an excellent resource and is highly recommended.

Hot Potatoes is a suite of multimedia authoring programmes that allow teachers to create a range of quiz type activities. These quizzes can be printed out on paper if you do not have internet access, they can be saved and opened in a browser without the need for an internet connection or placed on a web site and used live on the internet.

The five tools available in the box are

1. Jcross - a crossword maker. The teacher writes the clues and answers. Students click on the number down or across and answer the question
2. Jcloze - a cloze test maker (gap-fills) 
3. Jmix - learners drag jumbled words and punctuation marks in a  sentence into the correct order
4. Jquiz - a tool for making multiple choice tests
5. JMatch - essentially a drag and drop matching tool where learners can match words with definitions or pictures of objects with their names.

It is possible to add sound and video to Hot Potatoes activities. It is also posible to embed YouTube videos into the exercises.  For example, a gap-fill can be created by offering choices in the traditional way, A,B,C or D. In a gapped text such as this the teacher can blank out all the prepositions and test how well their students can use prepositions. Alternatively,  learners can listen to an audio or video file and complete the gap using their listening skills.

Hot Potatoes is free, which is fantastic, but it is beginning to look a little dated. There are no plans to update it at the moment although a commercially available updated version may be released at some point in the future.

Download Hot Potatoes
To download Hot Potatoes visit the site below. It is not necessary to register, give an email address, user name or anything else.

http://hotpot.uvic.ca/

Instructions
To get basic instructions download the helpful guide shown below;
http://hotpot.uvic.ca/hotpot6_help.pdf

How to embed YouTube a video;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=CO&feature=related&hl=es-419&v=9QdypOxbruc 


Examples
To see some examples of Hot Potatoes exercises for English language learners see James Thomas' work at;
http://www.fi.muni.cz/~thomas/English/aviator/

Community
There is a Q & A forum on a Yahoo groups site at;
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/hotpotatoesusers/

Hot Potatoes was created at The University of Victoria by Stewart Arneil and Martin Holmes. Three cheers for Stewart and Martin.