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. Hot Potatoes is shareware. That means you can freely download the program from the Internet (at Hhttp://web.uvic.ca/hrd/hotpot/ ). General description of the program 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 CANNOT 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.