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 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
• 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 (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.
• 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
• Enter your name and click "Register," then close the window when you see a message saying "Registration was successful"

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 (this should be the default)
• Click the "up" arrow next to the "Q" (for question 1) in order to enter a second question.
• 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.
• 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
• In "real life," you would define the "Go To Contents" button so it takes the user back to the webpage from where they got 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"]
  • Let's try this: it will be a brief review of what we learned about Dreamweaver. Launch Dreamweaver, create a basic page, and type "Click here for an exercise about me."
  • Save the page; name it "test.html"; for the location to save the file, navigate to the "Desktop" and create a folder named "html."
  • Go to the Desktop and drag your "potatoes" folder into your "html" folder
  • Now highlight "Click here" and use the folder icon next to the "Link" box in the Properties Window to select the html file you created in Hot Potatoes (i.e. your exercise).
  • Save your work and go back into Hot Potatoes; open the config file as above.
  • Under the "Buttons" tab, find the "Go to Contents" button, and use the folder icon there to navigate to your "test.html" page. Select it, and notice that the text in the box is now "../test.html," which tells the browser to "go up one folder level and find the file named "test.html."
  • Re-create the webpage (i.e. repeat step (2) above), view the resulting page in your browser, and try the "Go to Contents" button. It should take you to your "test.html" page. There, you can click on the link you created to go back to your exercise.

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.
• Create a folder named "images" and save it in your "html" folder, or in your "potatoes" folder, whichever you prefer. Now find an image in your IFS space or online and save it in this "images" folder. Place the cursor 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 we have time, try this out as follows:

• Create a second exercise using the "JMatch" potato (don't worry about the config file; just use the default).
• When you've created the html file and made sure the exercise works in your browser, open the "Masher" (and enter your name to "Register" again as before if prompted).
• 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 .jmt file). Add your add both your data files into the "Files" box, clicking "Add" each time.
• 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.