Language
teachers...Here is my brief review about Hot Potatoes.
Hot Potatoes
is freeware that enables language teachers to create interactive online activities
which then can be uploaded to a server where students have an access to. It
basically includes six
modules: interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence,
crossword, matching/ordering and gap filling exercises. You can look at the sample exercises to have an idea about what kind of exercises can be created by using it. First of all, you do not need to know the language of programming and it is not complicated to use it for creating web-based teaching materials. All you need to do is to enter your data, questions or answers. Here is how you can develop a matching exercise for the language classes.
In addition, Hot Potatoes provides form-focused activities to help learners
to make improvements in grammatical accuracy by noticing, correcting the
mistakes and immediate positive or negative feedback on the anwers. However, through these processes,
there is a limited interaction between learners and the only interaction, if it
is counted as interaction, occurs when students get the written pop-up feedback
to their answers which is prescripted and provided by the teacher. It seems
that Hot Patatoes do enhance student learning a language to the extent how it is created and used by the teacher. The intended use of the program is to create exercises
that allow students to practise language drills and find out correct answers
based on the feedback received immediately. Still, for some teachers, using Hot
Potatoes means tests rather then self-learning activities. It is advisable
to use for developing materials rather than testing.
As a
language teacher, in spite of limited interaction between the learners while
practising, I would definitely use it for some classes in which students need
supplementary grammar exercises for gaining accuracy through the web-based activities.
Useful links:
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