Hot Potatoes
Companion Web Sites, February 2003
Hot Potatoes opening screen  

CDIST Training Lab, Cairo, Egypt
Deborah Healey, deborah.healey@oregonstate.edu

Hot Potatoes is an authoring tool that helps teachers - and students - create interactive exercises that can be easily turned into web pages. Six types of exercises can be created: multiple choice, short answer, jumbled sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-filling (cloze) exercises. Created by teachers at the University of Victoria, Hot Potatoes is regularly updated and can be downloaded from the website listed below. It is free for non-profit educational use, as long as those who create exercises share them freely.

Hot Potatoes website
http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/halfbaked/
Download the latest version and read current Hot Potatoes news, as well as find links to Help and other topics

Hot Potatoes support group (at Yahoo groups)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/hotpotatoesusers/
Join to share your exercises and ask questions of other Hot Potatoes users.

Tutorials in a variety of languages, including English
http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/halfbaked/tutorials.htm

Some freeware and shareware authoring programs

MaxAuthor from the University of Arizona
http://cali.arizona.edu/docs/wmaxa/
A freeware authoring program. Completed courseware can utilize audio, video, footnotes, and graphics. Student activities include MaxBrowser, Listening Dictation, Pronunciation, Multiple Choice, Vocabulary Completion, and Audio Flashcards. More complex than Hot Potatoes, but works well with audio and video.

MVP WordSearch (shareware) from the CELIA archives
ftp://ftp.latrobe.edu.au/pub/CELIA/english
Create, solve and print word-search puzzles

TexToys (shareware)
http://www.net-shopper.co.uk/creative/education/textoys.htm
A suite of two authoring programs, Web-Rhubarb and Web-Sequitur, by Martin Holmes. The exercises are based on the Rhubarb (whole text deletion) and Sequitur (putting text back in order) programs originally developed by John and Muriel Higgins.

Win Flash by Dick Bryant (shareware)
http://www.kidsdomain.com/down/pc/winflash.html
This flashcard program has "smart" multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank capabilities.

WinQuandary by Stewart Arneil and Martin Holmes (shareware)
http://www.halfbakedsoftware.com/quandary/
Authoring program to make it easier to create action mazes. From the creators of Hot Potatoes. The shareware version limits the number of screens you can create.

Multimedia Tips and Resources

Teaching, learning and the impact of multimedia technologies
http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm00/articles005/erm0053.pdf .
This article looks at how multimedia presents information, how students interact both with the medium and through the medium with the teacher and other learners, and how knowledge is structured within multimedia.

Interactive Multimedia & the WWW in Education: Learning with IMM & the WWW http://www.soe.jcu.edu.au/subjects/conrod/ed1441/topics/topic5/topic5d.htm
A very brief overview of issues.

Multimedia Tips: Presentation Power
http://www.monitor.ca/monitor/issues/vol5iss2/feature5.html
The focus is on presentation software, but the concepts apply to any use of multimedia to convey information.

Extended Activities and Resources

HyperStudio Web Companion Site
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~ielp/software/hyperstudio.htm
Information about HyperStudio, multimedia, and authoring from Leslie Opp-Beckman

Constructing Meaning
Have students create their own exercises to share with the rest of the class. They'll enjoy doing it and understand more, and the teacher will work a bit less.

GDIST Software || IELP II Training Web Site || February 2003 CDIST Workshop
URL: http://oregonstate.edu/dept/eli/egypt/hotpotatoes.html and http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~ielp/software/
İDeborah Healey, deborah.healey@oregonstate.edu
Last updated: 10 July 2003