A Very Short Intro to Hot Potatoes

• German 221/231 Gateway Vocabulary Test
  • Large item bank; students see 40 items at a time; test is online for practice at all times; students take the test "officially" with a proctor
  • Submit menu & Scoring Algorithm modified "by hand"
• Online grammar diagnostic tests
  • Adjective endings Some items with images, some without
  • Multiple choice exercises could also be "short answer" formats - but these penalize typos etc.
• Reading text included: Gegensätze
  • Possibility to include target links to the text in the questions. Philomena will show us how to do this later!
• www.allgemeinbildung.ch > Deutsch:
  • Customized Hot Potatoes exercises; good sample of the available item types other than Multiple Choice (except for slash sentences)
    • Matching exercise
    • Cloze exercise / Drag and Drop
    • Hangman format [not based on Hot Potatoes]
    • Word Search format [not based on Hot Potatoes]
    • Crossword
      

University of Victoria Hot Potatoes Home Page:

http://hotpot.uvic.ca/

• Follow the instructions there to download Hot Potatoes. For Macs, you need the Java version. This version also works on Windows PCs, but the Windows version has some convenient features (e.g. "cloning" items) that make it easier to use than the Java version, at least for making simple exercises.
• When you first start up Hot Potatoes, it will ask you for your user name. This name is stored on your computer, and not sent to anyone; it will be inserted into your exercises to identify you as the author. You must provide a user name so that you can use all the features of Hot Potatoes.
• Note the Tutorials, FAQs, Sample Activities [Click on "HotPot Sites"] etc.

1. Creating a "Data File" in JQuiz

• This is where you enter your question, possible answers, and feedback
• Interface is fairly self-explanatory
• Enter your first question and the answer choices (and specific feedback for one or more of those choices, if you like); choose "Multiple Choice" as the format (this should be the default)
  • Don't forget to mark one of the choices as correct!
  • Note that you can later tell the program to randomize the answer choices ==> you could always make option A the correct answer.
• Click the "up" arrow next to the "Q" (for question 1) in order to enter a second question, etc..
• Save your work: Create a folder on your desktop called "potatoes" and save your file there.

2. Click on the icon between the book icon (for inserting a reading text) and the "cut" icon (scissors) to create an exercise:

• This creates a .htm (or .html) file that is viewable in a browser (unlike the data file you just created)
• Give this file the same name you gave your data file. The program automatically adds the appropriate extension.
• Select the option to view the exercise in your browser.
• If you don't see something that make sense, look for a message from your browser re: enabling ActiveX

3. Note that in the process of creating the html page, lots of information was added to the data file you entered (a color scheme, names of buttons like "Go To Contents," "Check Answers," etc.). This information is stored in a configuration file, which you can also customize.

• Click on the icon for showing the config file:
• Play around with the options, then save the config file using the same name you used for your data and html files
  • Note that the "Instructions" will only be visible (and not very prominent) before students start the exercise. The "Exercsise Subtitle" is prominent and remains visible the whole time, so may be a good place to type an example or important information.
  • Either hide the "Go To Contents" button, or give it a logical name and URL to send people to when it's clicked.
• Re-create the webpage (i.e. repeat step (2) above; use the same file-name as before and say OK when the program asks if you want to replace your previous html file) and look at the results in your browser
• Now put your exercise online as follows:
  • Log in to mfile.umich.edu
  • Open the "Public" folder and inside it, open the "html" folder [if there is no "html" folder, create one]
  • Upload your "potatoes" folder to the html folder [we'll see later why you wanted to upload this whole folder]
  • Your exercise is now on the web. What's its URL? Let's say your uniqname is "bspears" and the filename of the exercise you created is "adjektive.htm". Then the URL for your exercise is: http://www.umich.edu/~bspears/adjektive.htm

4. Inserting links & images

• Highlight some text anywhere in your data file, and click the "Insert Link" icon [to the left of the icon for the config file]. In the "Path or URL" box, paste the URL or use the browse icon to find a file in your "potatoes" folder that you want to link to. The "Text for Link" box should show your highlighted text.
  • Note that in principle you could insert a link to an audio file, too. If you do this, you should be sure to check the option to open the link in a new window [or include the TARGET="AUDIO" code] so that the audio opens in a new window, leaving the student with the exercise still open.
• Create a folder named "images" and save it in your "potatoes" folder. Now find an image and save it in this "images" folder. Place the cursor at the point in your data file where you want an image to appear. Click the "Insert image" icon and navigate to the image in your "images" folder; select it to insert it. Enter a reasonable width or height for the image (300 or 400 pixels is a good guess); the program will automatically calculate the other dimension so the image size is reduced to scale.
• Save your work, create a new html file (i.e. repeat step (2)), and see your image and your link.

5. Masher: The Masher allows you to combine multiple exercises into a sequence of activities. If you have time, try this out as follows:

• Create a second exercise using the "JCloze" potato (don't worry about the config file; just use the default). Hopefully the procedure will be reasonably intuitive.
• When you've created the html file and made sure the exercise works in your browser, open the "Masher."
• Click "Add," navigate to the first data file you created (i.e. the .jqz file, not the .htm file), select it and click "Open" and say "OK" to what the ensuing window displays. Repeat the same steps for the second data file you created (the .jcl file).
• Near the bottom of the "Masher" window, click on the folder icon next to the "Folder to create exercise in" field, navigate to your "potatoes" folder and select it.
• Then click "Build Unit" and view the magic in your browser: click on the link to your first exercise, and notice that the "forward" button at the very top of the page now takes users from your first exercise to the second one
• To give this page a title, go back to the "Masher" window, click on "Index" at the top, and enter e.g. "My exercises" in the "Title of unit" box. Click on "Build Unit" again and you'll see your title. Notice that here you can also choose a filename for your index page.
• You can now upload this to the web, as in the last part of step (3) above.