My Hotpot story so far...

In the first few CALL classes, I had no idea about the term Hot Potatoes repeatedly mentioned by Dr Izaham. I thought it was some kind of ESL websites where teacher and students need to browse for materials (just like the dave's cafe site). Later I found out that this is a free software designed for teachers to design a web based tasks for students. It includes five applications that enable us to create a test which are JCloze, JMatch, JMix, JCross and JQuiz. The exercises created from this software are viewed in Html format. It is noted that users are able to customize the design and the format of the exercises created. There are variety of tools provided in creating and customizing any exercise. Honestly, I felt some kind of strange when started to learn about this software. I mean why hot potato? The word potato itself doesn't reflect anything on test construction. Quite funny! :)

In my opinion, this software is such an interesting tool in helping teachers to prepare exercises for the students. For those who are looking to integrate the ICT in the classroom, this might well be the medium. I believe that this software is also user friendly. For a slow learners in terms of computers (like me) , they don't have to understand all those codings for the html to create exercises. It is all about generating ideas on what to test the students on and fill the questions on the column provided. It is not difficult to learn as users are able to try again and again. I was amazed when I tried the JCloze feature for the first time as I never expected a normal paragraph containing words can be changed into a fill-in-the-blank exercise with variety of answers. In a way, it helps greatly in terms of time consumption in preparing materials for the students. Rather than typing to prepare the multiple choice answers, we can just use the tools provided to make it happen. More, the design and layouts of the exercises created may become a motivational factor for students as it is interactive and less formal compare to the paper handouts.

However, I saw one obvious weakness in this application so far. This software is unable to record the marks of the students. It only publish the total marks of a task after the students finish answering it. So for teachers who are looking to fully utilize it in a lesson, they need to monitor and keep track of their students' performance every time they completed an exercise. Students are also able to change the wrong answers into the correct ones as there is no mechanism to punish or deduct the marks if the same question is being answered twice. For this matter, I strongly suggest that this software is used as a supplementary tools in giving exercise to students. Teachers might not be able to know the progress of every single students in the classroom (whether they really understand the topic or not) especially in the classroom with so many students... Well I had 47 boys when I did my practicum last semester. If I were using this software as a medium of testing and evaluating their English performance, I'm sure all of them would score 100% for every test given.

In conclusion, I can say that Hot Potatoes is a really interesting and interactive tool for teachers to prepare exercises for their students. Even though I still have several difficulties in using it (the picture didn't appear, selecting suitable authentic materials, etc), it saves a lot of time and energy required compared to preparing paper handouts. However, as the weakness being pointed out before, I strongly suggest that the software is used as a supplement rather than main sources in preparing exercises for the students.

Thank you.