Hot Potatoes

Hot Potatoes: The Excellent Tool for Quizes

Dear Colleagues,

The ubiquitous technology and online tools have made teachers' job much easier than before. The various use of online tools has led be here today to share with you an assessment tool with you. I am going to share a much user-friendly tool called Hot Potatoes. It gives you the opportunities to create quizzes and games, like cloze, matching, crossword offline and uploading it in moodle for learners.

Home screen of Hot Potato

How can I create Hot Potatoes exercises?

Hot Potatoes is a kind of tool which you need to download on your computer. In the home page of Hot Potatoes we canl find different installers for different PCs (Windows, Vista, Linux or Mac). We have to select the most appropriate one for our computers, download and install them.

This tool will then give us the following options for test items-

1. JCloze:  

    We can create simple gap fill activity or cloze test with this tool as reading or listening task. We can embed a reading text, audio or video and blank out several key phrases in the summary (or transcript) to practice comprehension. In case of a passage text, it gives the opportunity to select every nth word as a blank space as per instruction. Here is the video on making JCloze.

2. JQuiz: 

   This part is for creating quiz for multiple choice, short answers and multi-select answers as while reading or listening tasks. The following video gives the clear instruction about this.

3. JCross: 

   This part helps to create the cross-word puzzles for learners. We only have to type in the words for answers, and Hot Potatoes will arrange them into grids. Then we have to add the clues for each word. Here is the video for JCross.

4. JMatch: 

    JMatch supports in creating a matching (drag-drop) exercise or drop-down menu type of exercise. Vocabulary exercise, reordering texts and matching parts of sentences can be designed by this tool. Now you can have a look of the procedure from the following video.

5. JMix: 

   This is a listening task and rearrange words. You can have a better idea watching the following video.

How to embed text or you tube video in the assessment

In order to insert a video or a text for listening or reading, we have to click on the icon with picture of a book, a window will pop up there. In oreder to include text we have to copy text from source and paste it in ‘Include Reading’ box, add a title. For video, we have to paste the HTML codes from the YouTube video on the Reading text space. 

Application in Classroom and Limitations

Now, how can we use these exercises in our classrooms? We can pre design quizzes and after we finish teaching content we can check learners understanding very soon with these online quizzes. We can give a listening activity or a reading activity for extra practices as well as homework for flipped classroom. Moreover, the feedback is very prompt, as such students also can have quick feedback.

One of the shortcomings of this tool is that the result is not archived in the moodle. So, it is supporting learners by giving formative feedback, teacher cannot have any idea about their progress.  Moreover, so far you have understood that we need to have a website to upload this kind of tasks. In Bangladesh, most of the institutions do not have their websites, but as you know, government has circulated that gradually all institutions will have to create their own websites. And in those websites you have to create moodle in order to upload curriculum, content, reading materials, quizzes etc. So, hopefully, in near future we will reach to that destination, but gradual preparations should be taken for paving the way.

 I will try my best to come back to you with the other necessary tools as early as possible.

Till then, good bye.

Urmila Khaled