What is hot potatoes?

Hot potatoes

Hot Potatoes is shareware from Half-Baked Software which is based at the University of

Victoria in Canada. It is a program that allows you to make six different types of self-test

exercises. These exercises can also quite easily be imported into an LMS like Moodle to be used for assessment of learning content.Hot Potatoes was originally meant to create language exercises, and some HotPot exercises (like jumbled sentence) have little use otherwise. However, most exercises can be used for any subject. Exercises are made in two steps. First, you create the so-called ‘data file’ which has a Hot Potato XML extension (like .jcw or .jcl). This file is useless without the Hot Potatoes program but is used to edit the exercises later. The exercises are exported to web-based exercises (which have the HTML extension .htm) which can be displayed anywhere on the Web. Note that you CAN NOT RELOAD THE WEB PAGES INTO THE PROGRAM, so it is important to save your

data files.Before creating a Hot Potato exercise, you need to think about what you want to achieve with it. Do you want students to learn vocabulary items? Then the gap text (JCloze) or the short answer quiz (JQuiz) are the best choices. If you wish to test text comprehension, the multiple choice (JBC) or matching (JMatch) exercises are more suitable.

When you have selected the right exercise, you need to take into consideration its

possibilities:

• Multiple choice questions can be used for any subject. They are most effective when

they give good feedback to your learners (why is an answer wrong/correct).

• Short-answer Quiz questions are good in combination with sound clips, definitions or

gap sentences, but keep in mind that there can be only one answer (and if there are

more correct answers we must include all of them!). Therefore translation exercises are

not a good choice, because there are often many possible correct translations. Also, if

spelling is not crucial to your subject, you’ll find that you will have to think of all the

possible ways learners can spell a word – a daunting task!

• Crosswords bring a playful element into your study material, but they need to

contribute something (like testing knowledge or having learners train certain skills). The

quality of the clues determines much of the success.

• Matching exercises can be used in any situation where understanding of a subject can

be expressed in the combination of two objects or phrases. It is possible to combine for

example pictures with explanations (provided the pictures are small and the

explanations not too long. The drag and drop version (DHTML) looks nice but works only

with certain browsers!).

• Cloze texts can be used for any type of fill in exercises, with or without wordlist at the

top and with or without extra clues given. Learners are trained in understanding as well

as spelling. Cloze texts must not be too long (especially not if they have a wordlist at

the top; avoid too much scrolling!)

• The jumbled sentence exercise is suitable for any type of activity in which the learner

has to order something (e.g. the lines of a poem).

The instructions to your learners about what is expected of them must always be very clear (in all exercises). When you have finished with the data file, save it, and then create the webbased bexercise which you save under the same name as the data file so that you can easily find which ones belong together. Always check the exercise for spelling or punctuation errors you may have overlooked. When you make changes, do that in the data file, then save it again and overwrite the previous web page