ICT 4 ELT Portals

Hot Potatoes

Compiled and annotated by
James Thomas,
Faculty of Informatics,
Masaryk University,
Brno, Czech Republic.

• This is a widely-used web authoring program teachers use to create interactive exercises for their students. You can download the suite of programs from here for free, but read the conditions.
• You must register in order to be able to use the program to its full extent.
• The Masher is the newest component of HPs and is not free. If you are considering creating large suites of exercises, the Masher is useful.
• Their tutorial for the program is well-written: try it!
• Click here for selected related Hot Potatoes material.

Taxonomy and Samples

This webpage, and all the linked material, was created by Stan Bogdanov (Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at the New Bulgarian University). The Taxonomy is a very useful list of the types of language teaching material that can be created with each Hot Potato. For example, using the Gap Fill HP, he has created the following types of activities: Words given, Open Cloze, Multiple choice Clozes, Listening – Note-taking, Sentence transformation, Error correction - extra word, Word formation. Click here for the complete list and the links to Stan's examples.

Art

Hot Pots provide clip art. That can be used when making activities. The Photos and Animations portal contains links to websites that may be of use in creating HP activities.

To make colour schemes uniform across a series of activities, use the same colours. Here is an example of some preferred settings. You can also use the Save button in the Configuration dialog box. See the program?s Help and Tutorial for more information on this.

Hot Potatoes in use

• Technically interesting Hot Potatoes pages from English on line

  http://cla.univ-fcomte.fr/english/html/hotpot.htm

• Hot Pots sample sites

  http://hotpot.uvic.ca/sites6.htm

  The programmers of HPs recommend some very fine examples of how their program is used. It is interesting to see their uses beyond language teaching too.

• Aviator

  http://www.fi.muni.cz/~thomas/English/aviator

  A suite of exercises using all of the Hot Potatoes. The first and the last of the activities were created in the Compleat Lexical Tutor.

• Teaching Tools

  http://www.teaching-tools.de.vu/

• Hot Pots and TexToys

  http://www.cyberteacher.it/esercizi_eng.htm

  This page is available to those Hot Potatoes and TexToys users who would like to put their exercises on-line, but do not have a website of their own.

Use of video in HPs

As well as being able to add full text to HP activities, sound and videos can also be used as source material. Here are four examples with short videos. Best viewed in Internet Explorer.

• Domesticity
• Penguins
• Cement
• Beer Culture

Emailed results

Student results can be sent to the teacher by email. Here are two examples of how the student experiences it.

• Alexander Graham Bell

  http://www.fi.muni.cz/%7Ethomas/ICT4ELT/hot_pots/AGBell/Bell.htm

  A full text cloze that uses CGI to get student results sent by e-mail.

• CGI

  http://www.fi.muni.cz/%7Ethomas/ICT4ELT/hot_pots/cgi_demo.htm

  Simple demo of having your students' Hot Pots results automatically sent to you in an email.

Adding Tooltips

A tooltip appears as a little popup text when the mouse rests on a certain word or icon. These can be easily created in HPs typing a little bit of html, only a little. The instructions are here: http://hotpotatoes.keonox.com/CookBook/ToolTips.