If you are familiar with Hot Potatoes, you know that it is a fantastic way to produce self marking exercises that you can use as starters, plenaries, tests, etc and that you can simply save in your computer and they are then there for whenever you want to use them, saving you lots of time in preparation next time you come to use them.
If you have not used Hot Potatoes before, then I recommend you try it. The software is free and it allows you to create quizzes, fill-in-the-gap exercises, crosswords and jumbled sentence exercises. You may be familiar with websites such as Languages Online or my own Spanish revision website AsíSeHace.net: they both use Hot Potatoes to create their exercises. These two websites use the Hot Potatoes software to create Modern Foreign Languages exercises, but, needless to say, you can use it to create exercises in any subject you want.
The different types of exercises allow you to simply ask any questions you want or to ask questions relating to a reading text that you can add to your exercises. If you are sufficiently familiar with Hot Potatoes and you are able to add a reading text (by clicking the open book icon generally located on the top left of the task bar), then adding sound or video as input for your exercises is not much more difficult. All you have to do is copy and paste the following HTML code into the text box (instead or as well as some text):
<embed src=”/your_file_name.mp3” width=”180″ height=”32″></embed>
Change the file name into the name of your file with the correct file extension (the bit after the dot) and you are ready to go. You can easily change the dimensions of the player by changing the width and height variables in the code. It is also possible to use a video file instead of the sound file, but don’t forget to increase the height variable so that there is room to screen the video! Also, don’t forget to save the sound or video file in the same folder as the execise, otherwise it won’t work.
Click here to see an example of the above.
If you have a HTML editor such as the very good but ridiculously expensive Dreamweaver or the free and very decent NVU, you will then be able to customise your Hot Potatoes exercise even further.
