CREATING LANGUAGE LEARNING EXERCICES WITH HOT POTATOES
OVERVIEW
Hot Potatoes is a free software for creating interactive educational exercises for the World Wide Web. This software was designed to allow teachers to make interactive Web-based exercises with feedback for students. These exercises can be accessed by students at any Internet-capable computer terminal with a standard Web browser if teachers upload them to a web server. This software is also not-complex software since teachers do not need to know anything about web programming languages.
HISTORY
This program was created in the University of Victoria, Canada by Stewart Arneil, a Mac developer and web programmer; Martin Holmes, a windows developer; and Hilary Street, a Graphics designer. Although Hot Potatoes software was first released in 1997, it has had several versions and modifications since then. The latest version of this tool was released as freeware in 2009 and can be found at the hot potatoes website http://hotpot.uvic.ca/.
FEATURES
Hot Potatoes is a free exercise generator software that consists of six specialized tools capable to create web documents with multiple choice, open-ended, jumble-word, fill-in-the-blank, and crosswords activities and quizzes. Once the exercises are created, they can be uploaded to a web server where they can be accessed by students and cyber surfers from all around the world. As it was mentioned before, the use of the program does not require any programming knowledge; instead, teachers only have to type in the text and do click on a button to get the final output file done. Nonetheless, if they know about programming, these output files can be personalized in order to get a better result; for example, teachers can embed YouTube videos, music players or flash elements into their exercises, making them even more interactive, interesting and enhancing their possibilities.
Hot Potatoes program is supported on all recent windows platforms, from Windows 95 to Windows 7, and there is also a free version for Mac users. This tool was developed specially to create language learning exercises and it can give students instant feedback according to the selected answers on a question. A countdown timer can be set to limit the available time students have to develop the activity. Students can also get a final score based on the amount of attempts and mistakes they make. However, this simple program must not be used for language testing since no security measures are implemented and full results cannot be sent to the email address. Finally, it must be mentioned that, currently, the development of this software was stopped and user support is not provided. Hence, there will not be more versions of the software.
USEFULLNESS IN THE SCHOOL OF LANGUAGES
By using Hot Potatoes software, teachers not only get another chance to attract student’s interest, but also a new and effective way to make the exercises available on the web, anywhere, anytime.
Teachers in the school of languages can both create and share collections or series of these interactive web-based exercises and implement them on their projects, activities and classes. The software can become an essential part of the first, second and third level students’ activities because it allows them to create language learning exercises for sharing with peers in order to practice and improve their learning level in languages.
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCES
Winke, P. and MacGregor, David (July 21, 2006). Language Learning and Tecnology. Taken on March 12, 2011, form Language Learning and Tecnology: http://llt.msu.edu/vol5num2/pdf/review3.pdf
Written by
Jhorman Rodríguez Pulgarín
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