According
to TESL-EJ (2012), Hot Potatoes is exercise-creating program which can be used by
webmasters, teachers and even students to make a variety of interactive
exercises. Besides, these exercises can then be exported as HTML files and
launched on any website. In my opinion, using Hot Potatoes is one of the most
interesting ways in teaching the students. There are many advantages in using
Hot Potatoes as the sample exercise in the learning activity. First, students
can get variety helps to keep their motivation in learning the material.
Second, students can get an instants feedback or immediate activity that keeps
their motivation learning.
As
a teacher, it will be helpful and useful if you use Hot Potatoes in your class.
Here are some steps that you can apply in your classroom if you want to use Hot
Potatoes.
1. 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 it is used to edit the
exercises later. The exercise are exported to web-based exercises (which have
the HTML extension .htm) which can be displayed anywhere on the Web.
2. Before
creating a Hot Potato exercise, you need to think about what you want to
achieve with it, especially for your students. After you have finished to
choose the right exercise, you start to create an exercise. Here, I will tell
you about the exercises that you can find in Hot Potato.
a. Multiple
choice
It is the most
effective way to give feedback to your students.
b. Short-answer
Quiz
It help you to provide
questions which are good in combination with sound clips, definitions or gap
sentences, but in this application, you will only have one possible answer.
c. Crosswords
It brings a playful
element into you study material. The quality of the clues determines much of
success.
d. Matching
It can be used in any situation where understanding
of a subject can be expressed in the combination of two objects or phrases.
e. Cloze
It can be used for any type of fill in
exercises, with or without wordlist at the top and with or without extra clues
given.
f. Jumbled
Sentence
It is suitable for any type of activity in
which the learner has to order something, such as the lines of a poem.
3. When
you have finished with the data file, you have to save it and create the
web-based exercise which you save under the same name as the data file.
4. Do
not forget to always check the exercise for spelling or punctuation errors.
5. When
you want to make changes, please do the steps that in data file, save it again
and overwrite the previous web page.
6. Do
not forget to always check the link because if it is different, it will not
appear in the web.
Introduction to Hot Potatoes: http://academic.sun.ac.za/forlang_s/ftp/section7_html/hotpot_intro.pdf
Reference:
TESL-EJ. (2012, December). Creating Web-Based
Exercises in Hot Potatoes. Retrieved April, 16 2015 from http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume16/ej63/ej63m1/
