A Very Short Intro to Hot Potatoes

Sample Hot Potatoes Activities

• 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 forslash sentences)
    • Matching exercise
    • Cloze exercise / Drag and Drop
    • Hangman format [not based on Hot Potatoes]
    • Word Search format [not based on Hot Potatoes]
    • Crossword
• Matching: Making Pizza - ingredients with image and text
• Video dictation [fill in blanks]
  

University of Victoria Hot Potatoes Home Page:

http://hotpot.uvic.ca/

• Download Hot Potatoes
• Tutorials, FAQs, Sample Activities [Click on "HotPot Sites"] etc.

0. Registering for Free

• Once you've downloaded the program, open it and then open one of the "potatoes."
• Go to Help > Register > Get a Key
• Follow the instructions to have a registration key emailed to you for free; keep this email as this key will work for any version of Hot Potatoes you use anywhere

1. Creating a "Data File" in JQuiz

• This is where you enter your question, possible answers, and feedback
• Interface is fairly self-explanatory
• Enter one biographical question; choose "Multiple Choice" as the format
• Use the "clone" option under "Manage" to create a second, similar item
  • Unfortunately, this option is not currently available in the Mac version, which has been in the "Beta" stage for a long time...
• 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 html file 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
• Re-create the webpage (use the same name as before to replace your previous html file) and look at the results in your browser
• In "real life," you would define the "Go To Contents" button so it takes the user back to the webpage where they clicked to get to your exercise. To make this work, you would want to have your "potatoes" folder located inside the folder that houses your webpage (and also your images folder which you may want to use for these exercises!). You could try using the "browse" icon in the interface to select your referring page, or, if that fails, insert the "relative" URL by hand. If you followed these instructions, that "relative" URL would be: "../referringpage.html" [i.e. "go up one page and find the file "referringpage.html"]

4. Inserting links & images

• Highlight some text anywhere in your data file, click the "Insert Link" icon. In the "Path or URL" box, paste the URL or use the browse icon to find a file from your site 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.
• For our demo, find an image in your IFS space or online and save it in your "potatoes" folder. Place the cursor where you want an image to appear. Click the "Insert image" icon and navigate to the image in your "potatoes" folder; select it to insert it.

5. Masher: If we have time, create a second exercise using a different potato. Now open the Masher and use the interface to add both your data files into the "Files" box, clicking "Add" each time. Then click "Build Unit" and see the magic: the "forward" button takes users from your first exercise to the second one