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Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Moodle LMS: Hot Potatoes is Now Free!

I blogged recently about the development of the Nanogong and the Riffly audio-visual plugins for Moodle 2.0. Today, I'm pleased to announce that an old - that is, well-established -Moodle plugin is now freely available.

Now read on…

I first encountered the Hot Potatoes question-test (Q-T) and exercise generation suite back in 2006 as an MSc student in Dublin. As a commercially-available utility, it offered well-rounded enhancements to the fairly basic Q-T capabilities of the Moodle platform. As of version 6.2, Hot Potatoes is now free to use.

According to the developers Half-Baked Software Inc.

The purpose of the Hot Potatoes is to enable you to create interactive Web-based imageteaching exercises which can be delivered to any Internet-connected computer equipped with a browser. The exercises use HTML and JavaScript to implement their interactivity, but you do NOT need to know anything about these languages in order to use the programs. All you need to do is enter the data for your exercises (questions, answers, responses etc.), and press a button. The program will create the Web pages for you, and you can then upload them to your server.

There are five basic programs in the Hot Potatoes suite:

  1. JQuiz creates question-based quizzes.
    Questions can be of four different types, including multiple-choice and short-answer. Specific feedback can be provided both for right answers and predicted wrong answers or distractors. In short-answer questions, the learner's guess is intelligently parsed and helpful feedback to show what part of a guess is right and what part is wrong. The learner can ask for a hint in the form of a "free letter" from the answer.
  2. JCloze creates gap-fill exercises.
    Unlimited correct answers can be specified for each gap, and the learner can ask for a hint and see a letter of the correct answer. A specific clue can also be included for each gap. Automatic scoring is also included. The program allows gapping of selected words, or the automatic gapping of every nth word in a text.
  3. JCross creates word jumble / crossword puzzles which can be completed online.
    You can use a grid of virtually any size. As in JQuiz and JCloze, a hint button allows the learner to request a free letter if help is needed.
  4. JMix creates jumbled-sentence exercises.
    You can specify as many different correct answers as you want, based on the words and punctuation in the base sentence, and a hint button prompts the learner with the next correct word or segment of the sentence if needed.
  5. JMatch creates matching or ordering exercises.
    A list of fixed items appears on the left (these can be pictures or text), with jumbled items on the right. This can be used for matching vocabulary to pictures or translations, or for ordering sentences to form a sequence or a conversation.

These tools are complemented by a program called the Masher, which facilitates the creation of complete units of material (such as multiple-question quizzes) in one simple operation. The utility supports a range of question types including:

  • True/False
  • Short Answer
  • Multiple Choice
  • Cloze Test
  • Word Jumble / Crossword
  • Drag and Drop
  • Mix and Match

Hot Potatoes allows you to add:

  • Text
  • Images
  • Audio
  • Video
  • Question Timer
  • Web plug-in objects like Flash Player

to your web server or LCMS-deployed question tests. The tool also adds interoperability in the shape of SCORM 1.2.

Hot Potatoes is available for Windows (except 95), for Linux running Wine version 6.3 and for Mac OS X.

Click here to find out more about Hot Potatoes (external link to developer's site). .

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5 comments:

Unknown said...

This is great to hear. Does it also include the masher? I paid for the professional version and thought it was worth every penny, but am happy to know that it is free.

Michael Hanley said...

Hi Holly Sue,
Thanks for commenting. In answer to your query, the Masher is now free too. According to their website:

From September 1, 2009, Hot Potatoes is available as freeware, and the Masher no longer requires a separate registration key. If you want to use the Masher, just download the latest version of Hot Potatoes from the Hot Potatoes home page at the University of Victoria. When you have installed the program and provided a user name, you will be free to use all of the Hot Potatoes programs, including the Masher.

Best,
Michael
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Sigo Gatt said...

Great. I've downloaded this although I still have a problem posting the exercise on my students blog. Any idea how I can do this for free? Or do I need to register with hotpotatoes.net?

Michael Hanley said...

Hi Sigo,
Thanks for your comment; I'm afraid that I can't really say exactly the best way to integrate your questions without knowing a little more about the software you're using.

Half-Baked have produced a really good set of tutorials here: http://hotpot.uvic.ca/tutorials6.php. I suggest that you have a look here to see if they have already answered your question.

Best,
Michael
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Sigo Gatt said...

Thanks for your reply although I still can't figure out how to put the exercises on my blog for my students to try out. The version I spoke of was Java Hot Potatoes 6.0.2.20 and unfortunately I couldn't find any tutorials on how to publish without registering with hotpotatoes.net (for a yearly submission)