This week we tried our hands at some quiz authoring with Hot Potatoes, a freely available quiz editor which can create html web pages. The main goal was to get some quick hands-on experience in making a simple gap-fill quiz, and it seems that the technology was no problem at all. We were able to view the quiz on our own computers, but we have yet to learn how to upload it to the server and publish it (we are going to use the Bb content collection for this). I have to admit that we didn't pay a lot of attention to the content of the quiz, which was rather secondary to technical mastery to begin with, so we are going to have to focus on that aspect of things more in future.
Hot Potatoes may not be exactly as exciting as Second Life (see my previous post), but it is still good at what it does, which is authoring quizzes. It has a range of possible quizzes and you can set up multimedia as well (i.e. images and audio/video). The interface is still easy to use, the main technical problem comes when you want to customize and publish, which is nowhere near as easy as what we have come to expect, with all those web 2.0 tools that make customizing and publishing such a cinch.
What are your thoughts about quiz authoring with Hot Potatoes? Do you know of any other quiz authoring platforms? How do they compare?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
15 comments:
"Quiz authoring with Hot Potatoes" seems to make the item creation easier for teachers. However, I doubt the use of it in teaching practice. With the quiz produced in the help of Hot Potatoes or other techniques, teachers will certainly engaged students into drills and practice, which makes the process become behaviourist CALL. If students can do quizs in a traditional way, such as grammar drills or cloze tests, why should they be placed at front of the computer to suffer from the radiation from the computer and the harm that the computer has for the eyes?
Nevertheless, there are some necessity for the use of computer assisted drills or quizes. One of the advantages is the quick feedback right after students finish the tasks. In addition, computer assisted drills can blend pictures or audios easily with texts, which makes some exercises such as listening practices more convenient for students. In this sense, I believe computer assisted drills are better used in learner autonomous learning rather than in classroom teaching. Teachers can create some quizes for students to complete after class so as to enhance their learning.
I must admit, I was surprised to discover that Hot Potatoes was actually the program responsible for all those "free" quizzes on the Internet. Truth be told, I am not a big fan of those tests as I find them too elementary both in content and design. However, it does make it convenient for teachers to come up with something "cyber" should schools request them to design IT-related test material.
One feature that I like about Hot Potatoes is that videos can be used, as evidenced by the sample listening section. I think teachers should make good use of that component and try it out first before criticizing the monotonous layout of the program.
Drills get boring in a heartbeat but there is a need in the Hong Kong education system to drill students on grammar and vocabulary because that's what both students and parents want (part of syllabus = justifiable). And you know it is damn tough to argue with parents. So instead of using printed papers, why not try these free Potatoes and save some paper in the process, not to mention the time spent on marking.
All in all, I would recommend Hot Potatoes to my colleagues. For some reason, though, I think the paid version has a whole lot more tricks up its sleeve.
Firstly, I think it is amazing to create my own test for students on-line. Secondly, I agree with Claire that the practicability of using Hot Potates. In my point of view, a lot of things should be taken into consideration. On the one hand, the test items, the target skills, the length of text and so on (I learned from the course of Testing and Evaluation). On the other hand, whether the all the students can get access to computer to finish the tasks.
The job of creating test is rather difficult for a teacher.
However, Hot Potatoes can be a good helper as the last step of creating test. Especially it can add mutilmedia there.
In the course of Testing and Evaluation, Eva also recomended us two other things, EasyTestMaker and Quiz Center, which I think I am interested in ecxploring in the near future.
Simple and straightforward as it is, the Hot Potatoes can be used to assist school teacher with test item editing. It helps the learners assess their achievements, and evaluate their progress by doing web-based language tests. Although paper-based tests are now widely used, the digitalized tests have enormous advantages such as easy for the students to search through past tests the errors they made, and key knowledge they highlighted on the test paper. According to my observation and experience, many of the students find it difficult to retrieve from memory what particular type of errors they have made most in their past tests. Some hardworking students may keep a diary of ‘Analysis of frequently made errors’ or the like, yet for many, they may even be reluctant to bother with their past papers piled up in a dusty corner of the study room. So, why don’t we suggest the teachers (or the school) to opt for digitalized tests and make the revision easier for the learners?
I quite agree with what Robbie said. The Hot Potatoes could be a useful tool for both teachers and students. For teachers, the easy editing of a test saves lots of precious time; for students, this web-based tests created by Hot Potatoes reduce tedious work of organizing their own test files. What’s more, the Hot Potatoes is really environmental-friendly!
Maybe I am too shallow to see other advantages of Hot Potatoes. To be honest, I am not a big fan of that, because I am sick of those exercises like filling in the gap, matching, etc. I have done enough during these years. The Hot Potatoes might be a favorite of those who like to drill students, but not for me.
Creating a test is more than what the Hot Potatoes is capable of. Like Hallie’s opinion, there are many things should be taken into consideration.
As a quiz-creating tool, the hotpotatoes is very user-friendly. Teachers do not need to be an IT expert to apply it. It is less time-consuming but more interesting since online multi-mode texts such as audio-visual materials can modified and integrated. In a way, the hotpotatoes makes teaching environmentally friendly, too, since paper can be saved by using e-learning materials. It is convenient for students, too. They can seek help online if they have difficulty while hints can be set with the hotpotatoes for the students who get the wrong answers so that students can get immediate feedback. Moreover, different quizzes can be presented in a tidy and systematic way so that students do not have to spend time filing the weeksheets and risk losing them. I think the hotpotatoes acts as great extended self-learning materials. The online quizzes serve as a good source of daily marks. But we can’t set heavy weighting because learners can cheat with the convenience of internet.
Although the hotpotatoes can assist classroom teaching, it is not perfect. I agree with Clair that most of the quizzes are drilling exercises, a type of behaviorist CALL. The exercises created by the hotpotatoes is not so interactive and authentic. Teachers should be not stuff learners with large amounts of online quizzes just for the sake of being technology-oriented. In fact, it goes back to the same view point that I have learned from the article by Mark Warschauer, all the technologies are not important in themselves but the way they are used to help with student-centred collaborative language teaching and learning.
There seems to be a lot of negative comments about the behaviourist CALL and Hot Potatoes is just another boring old drill and kill thing.
However, if you look at it from a student's perspective a matching routine on paper is going to be boring, the same test on a computer is interesting and fun, and therefore liable to be used. More and more students have computers at home and if they do that sort of activity at home (rather than Counter Strike) it has to be for the better.
Young children are mesmerized by graphics so it makes sense to exploit this when possible. I have a hunch that it will be a lot easier to become competent at devising Hot Potato material than becoming proficient at Second Life ! Then again it is quite likely that the students will be able to show the teacher how to do things on SL. For cloze tests on Hot Potato I would consider looking at Odd News in http://news.yahoo.com/ Sometimes there are funny stories in Odd News that might well be usable for text based exercises.
I have managed to get Hot Potatoes up and running on a Windows 7 64 bit computer. The first time round the computer fell over, this could be an OS problem (That is Operator Stupidity, sometimes written as a ID 10 T error).
As an English teacher in senior high school in mainland, China, I have to say, one of the heaviest burden is preparing for the quiz every unit. I admit that most exercises are from the published books or any other publications, but we find that teachers are those who understand their students’ proficiency level most. Therefore, teachers should make test paper or other usual quizzes by themselves, which can only review students’ real performance. Another problem is the reading texts on paper are always similar or out of date, and we do need something new and interesting. Internet can satisfy us, while “Copy and paste” is the shortcut. So now, the only problem is how to make full use of the updated and useful material on net. The key to this problem is using Hot Potatoes, which save your time and simplify the problems about techniques.
I don’t agree with Clair about “teachers will engaged students into drills and practice” by using Hot Potatoes in teaching practice, “which makes the process become behaviourist CALL”. First of all, there is no teaching practice without any behaviourist teaching approach, as a long-term teaching. Secondly, take the latest College Entrance Examination in Guangdong province for example, there is a new item type in recent years, which seems to be a short answer item, but actually it test on grammar and sentence structure. To practice this kind of items, teachers usually have to prepare a lot of exercises for students. With the help of Hot Potatoes, we can do this exercise at the first five minutes of every lesson. In teaching practice, esp. when preparing for the most important exam, it is necessary to do this straightforward exercise. Therefore, Hot Potatoes is worth a try to every teacher.
Thanks for all of these interesting comments. In my view, quizzes of this kind do not have to be limited to the kind of structural drill and kill that is associated with behaviourist approaches to language learning. If you are creating online learning materials then these activities can provide a way for your students to interact with the computer (for example in reading or listening comprehension) in ways designed to develop their cognitive strategies. I agree that this has its limitations as well.
I don't see the activities as being limited to tests either, but prefer to see them as supporting skills development in online teaching materials. I think it is important to consider what pre and post activities can be organized around the online materials (for example, more productive speaking and writing tasks) as otherwise, the software will tend to constrain the approach that you take.
If you get a chance to try out any alternative quiz generation software, please feel free to post a review of it, and share your findings. I'm sure we would all benefit from that.
I've read in a few places online that Content Generator offers more variety than Hot Potatoes in terms of the types of quizzes, games and applications you can author. It looks like a colourful version of hot potatoes but it is more than that. If your students are into games, especially sports, they would find Content Generator to be much more appealing than Hot Potatoes.
The downside is that to have full access to all the generators you or your school would have to empty your pockets a little. Only 'Multiple Choice Quiz Generator' and 'Match up Quiz Generator' are free to use.
As with all things in life, you get what you pay for, but you might find Content Generator worthy of investment after you have tried out some of the demos like the 'Penalty Shootout' one.
Here's the link, see what you think: http://contentgenerator.net
I am really impress about the Hot Potatoes because it is the first time for me to use this kind of software to create a task. It is fun though to let students doing the task by using computer and they must enjoy doing it as well. However, I agree with what Claire mentioned about if students can do tasks in the traditional way, why bother putting them in front of the computer and do the same task? I think the main reason is to stimulate students' motivation. And the other advantage of Hot Potatoes is that students can get the feedback right after they finish the task.
I should have another go at Hot Potatoes, but I really don't want to have my computer crashing in the process. For somebody who is not a geek I seem to be really depend on them.
I think HotPotatoes allows teachers' to construct their own tests for their students. First of all, many students are bored with pen and pencil assessments and they are bored with blackboard and textbook in language lessons. Although publishers may supply e-resources such as e-books, question bank, online worksheet, etc. for teachers. However, usually the questions may be either too easy or difficult or the item types may be only gap-filling in sentence level, which may not be a good practice or assessment for students.
With HotPotatoes, teachers can write their own questions in various item types such as MC, gap filling, open cloze, matching, etc. Teachers can also includes pictures and a link to YouTube video in the test paper. Therefore, I think HotPotatoes is a great invention!
It is no surprising to see that there is such a user-friendly platform for teachers to create web-based quizzes. However, as what Claire mentioned teachers would be tempted to create a space for more drills and practices which may turn out to be another traditional grammar or exercise book. With this in mind, teachers should be careful with the design of their hot potatoe quizzes. I do not object to the use of on-line quizzes in the form of gap-fills, open-cloze exercises as one advantage of them will be their instant feedbacks and help button functions. In addition, students will be allowed to re-do the exercise and choose whatever they fancy when using it. They can enjoy autonomy while learning English. It is an important concept in this day and age as the ever-changing technology has already changed the learning format of our students nowadays. Compared with their counterparts in the past, this generation expect more fun, freedom and less restrictions in their learning. They prefer tasks in multi-modal formats where they can read, listen, write and even speak at the same time. Although Hot Potatoes is not capable of allowing teachers to creat speaking activities, listening tasks along with videos are easy to be developed . No wonder why so many teachers like using it! With such a friendly too, I hope that I can make good use of it to create my own learning materials for my students to use.
Hot Potatoes is somehow a convenient tool for developing tests online. Students can drill and practise on the test with trials and errors. For some less user-friendly interfaces like crossword puzzle, I think it is the only solution for saving time instead of using Javascripts to developing homepages.
Post a Comment