Hot Potatoes

What is Hot Potatoes?

Hot Potatoes is a freeware which people can use in any purpose and project they like. It contains six applications, enabling users to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching or ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web.

Values

• It provides users with the opportunity of creating their own projects, exercises and tasks. The more interesting and amazing point is that users have chance to design their own feedbacks for each step or the whole task when they are using this tool to produce their own projects.
• Hot Potatoes offers options and samples on task's type for users, whcih is easy and convenient for any exercise or task's producing.
• For starters, tutorials and resources on Hot Potatoes are provided on the homepage. What is more, many users contribute themselves in creating the tutorials and useful materials in their mother tongue, such as Chinese, Spabish, English, Danish and French and so on. In my opinion, producing different language version of turotials can help Hot Potatoes quickly and widely spread around the world.

How to employ it in class?

1. A whole lesson can be designed to teach students how to use Hot Potatoes, as long as they have interests.
2. Teacher can demonstrate a sample first, then, students can create their own exercises or tasks. Pair work or group work could be better.
3. Once each group finishs thier tasks, teacher can arrange them to do other groups' tasks and give feedbacks if time permits.
4. Actually, my course tutor arranged one lesson about Hot Potatoes a few weeks ago. Most procedures I mentioned previously are from her lesson. While creating the task was kind of pressing but exciting, in my opinion, that lesson indeed provided good chance for me to gain a general idea on Hot Potatoes, and I also got the chance to practise how to use it.



Some Limitations

• While the application is free, it is not open-source. Users have to download the software online and install it into their computer before they use it.
• Certainly, internet access is required.
• Besides, some unexpected problems might happen, such as failure in uploading pictures necessary for tasks, or something else.