Hot Potatoes - create interactive Web-based exercises

What is Hot Potatoes ?

The Hot Potatoes is a sex of six authoring tools, created by the Research and Development team at the University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre. They enable you to create interactive Web-based exercises of 5 basic types. 
The exercises are standard Web pages using XHTML 1.1 code for display, and JavaScript (ECMAScript) for interactivity. It is supported by all common browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and so on. Also, you can create exercise in any language, or in a mixture of languages.

You don't need to know anything about XHTML or JavaScript to use the programs. All you need to do is to enter your data - texts, questions, answers etc. - and the programs will create the Web pages for you. Then you can post them on your Web site.

Hot Potatoes is a freeware. You will be asked to register when you start the application. It is simply asks for your name; your name will be inserted into exercises you create with Hot Potatoes, identifying you as the author of the exercises.

Then, you can access all features, like this.

It has the following exercises that can be created.
(click to see example)

1. JQuiz (interactive multiple-choice)
   JQuiz (A gap-fill with drop-downs and individual questions)
   
2. JMix (jumbled-sentence)
3. JCross (crossword)
4. JMatch (Drag-and-drop matching)
   JMatch (ordering)
5. JCloze (gap-fill exercises)

Lastly, The Masher is to put all your exercises together to create a menu-like site.

Sample Activities

My friend, Nursrat and I created two sample exercises by using JMatch and JCloze. We are both new user to Hot Potatoes, we spent about half an hour including a little exploration, reading through the texts we chose, created exercises and trying to make them work on the website.

We chose a summary and analysis of a novel, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.(click to see the text)
Here are the activities we made.

• JCloze-gap-fill-elements of literature

• JMatch-synonyms

Then, we used The Masher. It will come up with something looks like an index.

(But this is not ours.)









Overall, I want to introduce this program not only because it looks very easy to create exercises with small amount of time but also because I encountered many problems during exploring. Next part, I am going to talk about some benefits and drawbacks.

Benefits

• different types of exercises provided
• quick to make
  For a quick generated exercise, this would be really useful.
• it could be a web link
  (It should be able to be a web link, if so, it would be convenient to give out to students or others.)

Drawbacks & Limitations

• user-unfriendly
• out-dated
  These two are interrelated, I guess. I noticed that the home page of Hot Potatoes are not updating since 2013, and it was originally created in about 2003. That's why the interface looks not quite friendly now in 2018. I believe it was really an intuitive interace at that time. Even now, all we need to to is to put the text in, then it will come up with a ready-make exercise.
  Moreover, it needs old version of JavaScript to run on MacBook.
  
• not really compatible with MacBook
  Although I can download and installed it, it cannot be well-functioned. I can make quizzes, but I can't export to websites.
  Also, files created in others computers(Microsoft version) cannot be import to mine, can't even open it.
  
• not sure how to use it on the website and get the real link.
  I found that even thought we've made an activity and exported it as htm. file, we can't use that beside the computer we used to make. I wonder if we need to upload to some cloud space?
  (Looking forward to some comments below to provide us some information)
  
• The interface looks not so desirable for students nowadays.
  Mentioned above; due to the time it was made(my opinion)

Hot Potatoes for Primary English Teacher in Taiwan

Last part of this post, I would like to suggest some things we could apply Hot Potatoes in Taiwan's Primary context.

• Remedial Class
  Usually, students in the remedial class may be slow-learners, low-achievers, or just 'not there yet'. 
  And, usually, it is a mixed-ability class with students coming from different classes.
  
  AND, usually, there is only one computer in a classroom.
  
  SO, if it is possible, one group of students of the same of similar level can do the exercise together. It also offers them opportunity to work things out by themselves or may be through discussion within the group.

• Differentiated Class
  If you sometimes group students by their level, hot potatoes may give a little bit of help, as the same concept of above. In terms of the different levels of the text, see the post "Same text written for different levels" for examples.
  (The website-Newslea.)

• Student's Individual practices
  For students with less confidence, need, or want extra practices, teachers can assign these practices.

However, because by using Hot Potatoes means the you basically have some texts to refer to, it would be more suitable for students with a certain reading level. Using exactly the same text as taught in class would be also good for students.