How to Create Online Exercises Like a Pro Using Hot Potatoes

Hello, everyone! How have you been? Hope you are all doing great. 😃

Readers, have you ever been struggling to find online tools to create exercises for your students? If yes, then this post will help you with that!

Recently, my CALT group (Group 5) has tried a free application called Hot Potatoes which can be used to generate multiple types of exercises. In order to help you comprehend the use of the Hot Potatoes application, feel free to have a look at our group's presentation video about Hot Potatoes here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/18WzAbJF0K0QEOQTGLsF5_UjVVodUNBgI/view?usp=sharing. In our presentation, we explain the function of Hot Potatoes and give a short tutorial on using each tool in the application. 

In Hot Potatoes, you can make 5 different types of exercises and compile them into one exercise. In addition, students can directly do the exercises through a webpage and even get their score. Isn't that awesome? 😄 Therefore, we may also use Hot Potatoes to assess students' comprehension since we can check their score results. 

Now, let's find out how to create online exercises using Hot Potatoes through the following steps:

1. Open this link: https://hotpot.uvic.ca/, then go to the Download section and download the application by clicking the circled button.

2. After you've finished downloading it, open the application and you'll see all the tools offered by Hot Potatoes. The tools include JCloze, JMatch, JQuiz, JCross, JMix, and The Masher.

3. You may start clicking each tool to start making the exercises. Each tool has a different function. Let me summarize the function of each tool below:

• JCloze: making a gap-fill exercise
• JMatch: making a matching exercise
• JQuiz: making a quiz
• JCross: making a crossword puzzle
• JMix: making a jumbled-sentence exercise
• The Masher: compiling all exercises in one place 

In the process of making the exercises (JCloze, JMatch, JQuiz, JCross, and JMix), I suggest you save your work first to avoid your work being lost, and also to enable you to insert pictures in your exercises. Look at the toolbar of the tool you use and click the File button, and then click Save As. After you have done filling in the details of the exercises such as the title, questions, and answer keys, etc, click the File button on the toolbar, and click Save.

5. Now, to turn your exercise into online exercises, you need to export your exercise into a webpage by clicking the circled button under the toolbar.

Especially for JMix and JMatch, there are two different versions of a webpage that can be made. Feel free to choose what design you prefer. 

6. Last but not least, I'd like to talk about The Masher. As you've known, the function of The Masher is to compile exercises into one page. So, in order to use this tool, you need to make Hot Potatoes exercises first (JCloze, JMatch, etc). Then, upload the files you'd like to be included in your compiled exercise by clicking + Add files, then choose the file you want.

After that, you can rename the title of your webpage and export it into a webpage by clicking Build unit.

After that, your exercises would be compiled, and for some tools that offer 2 webpage versions, you need to choose the version you want to use in your compiled exercise. More or less, the webpage will look like this:

The exercises you've uploaded will become clickable links directing to the exercises, which you can directly do.

So, that wraps up my post about creating online exercises using Hot Potatoes. 😁 I also have made some exercises using each tool in Hot Potatoes which you can access and download here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-bTPj19YmQmyU29maeRmQc8S_i2uLtRq?usp=sharing.

In my opinion, Hot Potatoes works like a charm because of the varied exercises that we can make and give to the students. Additionally, it is easy to use as there are clear instructions from the application to guide you while you are working on each tool. 

Hopefully, this post could help you understand how to use Hot Potatoes to create online exercises. Looking forward to seeing how your Hot Potatoes exercises turn out! 😃