Hot Potatoes

Initial Impressions

When you first click onto the Hot Potatoes (HP) homepage you might think you've gone back to the 90's, and are doing some sort of dated time warp, but looks can be deceiving. You should never judge a book by its cover. Appearances are often misleading. Beauty is only skin deep. Okay, that's enough idioms. The point I'm trying to make here is that this tool is exceedingly powerful and shouldn't be dismissed for having a simplistic interface. You have to download the programme, but once you've done that you can start building your very own online materials.

The Building Process

The first thing you need to do is find an appropriate text for your learners. Once you've done this then you can start the process. There are 5 kinds of potato (JMatch, JQuiz, JCross, JCloze, and JMix) with each having the ability to produce different exercises, plus the Masher (that acts as a suite, which combines the tasks made). Here are a few screenshots of the stages I went through:

JCloze (Gap Fill Exercise)

JQuiz

The Masher 

End Product

Choice Of Exercises

Gap Fill

Quiz

Verdict?

It's an incredibly powerful tool, which actually requires very little training as it's so simple and straightforward to use. The 'Getting Started' tutorial, once you open the programme, is a useful place to start but being brave, relying on your intuition, and giving it a go is also a good way of doing it. It could be deemed slightly limited with only 5 options (but these can be adapted).

For Language Learning

• Like other tools, giving your learners exposure to the text beforehand is imperative.
• JMatch - Can be used to create a matching exercise with key words and definitions. Or you could get your students to choose the correct synonym/antonym. Verbs and prepositions could also be useful. In fact with high level students this could be a great way of presenting phrasal verbs or idioms.
• JQuiz - A fantastic way of either starting the lesson, as a warmer, or finishing the lesson by testing your students on what they've learnt. Useful for all levels as you can grade it appropriately. Teaming students up would be a good way of promoting collaborative learning, and introducing some friendly competition into the classroom.
• JCross - Semantically it seems like this is for the advanced student as it's a crossword puzzle but, like the JQuiz, it can be easily graded for lower levels. 
• JCloze - This is the classic gap fill which helps students with sentence structure, syntax, prediction, and reading skills. The Auto-Gap is a time saver, but be careful to double check everything before finalising.
• JMix - This is a really useful function where students have to recreate a jumbled sentence into its correct form. Once again this is beneficial as it promotes syntax and word order. Or present gradable vocabulary where students have to put it in order. This could work with lower levels (the alphabet) to higher levels (quantifiers).
• The Hint Button - This is an absolutely brilliant feature of HP as it enables you as the exercise builder to scaffold and help your learners to try and predict the correct answer. Suggestions, and hints I used in my materials were: the first letter of the word, the definition, antonyms, synonyms, and singular/plural forms. All very helpful for language learning.
• The Feedback Button - Once again, this enables you as the exercise builder to give your students thorough feedback on any wrong answers. Rather than just putting 'No,' a detailed justification of why an answer is wrong is more likely to help students for the future.
• The Score System - Useful for students as it could be good for morale, or initiating some friendly competition between groups.
• Could be used in the classroom, outside the classroom as a homework or pre-lesson task, or used in the flipped classroom - it's a very versatile tool.
• For advanced HP users, it is possible to embed audio and video files, with links to youtube too.
• Could be used for in class assessment - obviously all students would need a device, and the teacher would have to keep an eye on wandering eyes but it could be an innovative idea which saves teachers from having to mark written tests.
• It's free!