Hot+Potatoes

=Moodle and Hot Potatoes= by Bruce Moon eslbruce@gmail.com

Moodle and Hot Potatoes are a great combination. "Too much starch!" No, not noodles, Moodle! Moodle is an open source (FREE!) learning management system (LMS), similar to Blackboard. You put Moodle on your school's server, your own host/server, or use someone else's that is already installed. Moodle has an extensive worldwide community of educators that have developed modules to add functions to Moodle. The HotPot module for Hot Potatoes is one that I use weekly with my class of intermediate ESL learners. The Hot Pot module comes with the standard install of Moodle; you or your administrator) just have to turn it on.

Hot Potatoes is an exercise creator suite that allows you to produce five different kinds of exercises that are a combination of HTML and Javascript. You don't need to know HTML or Javascript to use Hot Potatoes. The exercises stand alone by themselves so if you don't have access to Moodle, you can still create web exercises in Moodle that you can upload to any webspace that you have. If you are comfortable saving documents and uploading them using a interface like you would for a blog or Yahoo Groups, you probably will be fine with Hot Potatoes. Hot Potatoes charges for a commercial license, but it " is free for use by individuals working for state-funded educational institutions which are non-profit making, on the condition that the material you produce using the program is freely available to anyone via the WWW. "

What can you do with Hot Potatoes? The five exercise modules that are part of the Hot Potatoes package are (the "J's" come from the Javascript that all of the modules use):
 * JMatch- creates matching exercises which can include pull down menus or drag-and-drop,. You can also save an exercise as flashcards to drill before having students do the matching.
 * JMix- You can split up sentences into parts, words or even words into letters. Using a drag and drop interface, students recreate the words or sentences
 * JCross- creates a crossword where you click on the numbers to enter the words
 * JQuiz- gives you the ability to make quizzes with multiple-choice, multiple-select, short answer or hybrid (starts out as a short answer, but becomes a pull-down multiple choice if a student doesn't answer correctly
 * JCloze- makes fill-in the blank (cloze) exercises. You can select the words or have JCloze automatically create the blanks for each x number of words that you specify. These exercises can also be outputted as text to your computers clipboard and then used in your word processor to make printable exercises
 * Masher is a sixth tool that enables you to easily combine exercises. However, you need to purchase a license to use it

I've used Hot Potatoes a lot, but I still haven't harnessed all of its power. Most of the exercises allow you to link to websites, pictures, or audio files. A new feature is the ability to insert "objects" like web video and have a player open. Exercises can be linked together to form a sequence. I've had students start with a flash card exercise with audio files to help with pronunciation, move to matching, then do a crossword, and finish with the cloze exercise. Reading text can be inserted into exercises as preparation for doing the exercise. This week I used the "insert object" feature to link to a web page from [|www.ready.gov] to make a quiz and a cloze exercise using the Flash video of a public service announcement. I am planning to use the same feature to make some quizzes for the Voice of America Special English news (http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/index.cfm ) that my students listen to weekly.

Why combine Moodle with Hot Potatoes? By itself, there's no way to tell which students have and haven't done an exercise, how well they did, and how much time they spent on an exercise. If the exercise is in Moodle, you can. A new feature of Hot Potatoes is the ability to create SCORM-compliant exercises that can be uploaded by Moodle. "SCORM" stands for "Shareable Content Object Reference Module". A SCORM module can be used by a learning management system like Moodle or Blackboard (Yes, you can use Hot Potatoes in Blackboard too). Some of the exercises that I have created in the past have included pictures I took with my digital camera and audio I recorded with Audacity (free open source audio recording software). These created a large number of files which were hard to keep track of and sometimes confusing to upload. Now both Moodle and Hot Potatoes can handle multiple files either as simple compressed zip files or as a SCORM module.

The best way to start with Hot Potatoes is to look at what others have done and then download it for yourself and experiment with it. You can Google "Hot Potatoes exercises" with maybe your field, such as GED or ESL, added. The Hot Potatoes website has a list of some Hot Potatoes sites: http://hotpot.uvic.ca/sites6.htm You can check out what I have created by registering at http://eslcapital.us/learning and then selecting the Florin Tech Intermediate Class to see my weekly assignments.

Hot Potatoes can be downloaded from http://hotpot.uvic.ca/. Moodle has a Hot Pot module user group, the Hot Pot site has online tutorials, and you will find tutorials created by universities and school districts.

OTAN has classes in using Moodle.