Hot Potatoes
Short link to this page: http://bit.ly/MAELT_HP
Hot Potatoes is a powerful suite of Web authoring tools from Half-Baked Software Inc. and the University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre. The program can be downloaded from their site which also contains various support and recommended examples.
In essence, we download the program and use it to make web-based activities: clozes, crosswords, jumbled sentences and quizzes. It is very easy to make these simple, single activities but customising them in various ways can be quite demanding. They integrate easily and well into Moodle courses.
Thousands of teachers have used Hot Potatoes to create exercises, strung them together into learning series, and uploaded them to the web.
Many of them are of very dubious quality as they have not been created for your students or with your view of language and language acquisition in mind. The Hot Potatoes Tutorials provides some useful guidance in this regard.
Over the years, I have created many activities using Hot Potatoes. The video examples linked on the right were designed to demonstrate several uses of video in HPs for language learning, including follow up activities.
Here are four links to interactive exercises created in Hot Potatoes that each revolve around a very short video.
Hijacking Hot Potatoes
This book by Stan Bogdanov is dedicated to extending the capabilities of Hot Potatoes. It is intended to help you make the best use of the Hot Potatoes suite so that you maximize the learning opportunities for students.
The recipes in this book are both simple tricks and more complex code implementations that bring more interactivity into the exercises created with Hot Potatoes as well as when it is integrated into in Moodle.
Other language learning activities are linked below.
