So today I saw a tweet about Hot Potatoes and Quandary now being freeware.
Although many others i know swear by Hot Potatoes, I have not spent much time with either application before, but this did prompt me to download and install them.
One thing to note, that although Hot Potatoes it is not open-source. Not an issue really, as long as your trust the creators, which I do.
So what is Hot Potatoes?
Its a collect of applications which enable you to create a range of exercises for online delivery. These include interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises.
Installation was quite easy, and the download was only 9 Mb. Once launched, it asked for a user name, and language choice, and then it was ready to roll.
The interface made me smile, particularly the masher which enables you to build a sequence of exercices into a complete unit. I can see where this would be useful.
Starting with jCloze, this was very straight forward to set up the exercise. Then i went to save it, and found a lot of options, which needed exploring.
Firstly you could include reading text for it either typed in or a html file included. Then you have the option to include dublincore meta data about the resource, which i must admit impresses me. So many times, metadata about resources is seriously lacking.
The saving options included HTML Page, zip package, scorm 1.2 package, a page for printing and lastly an export for WebCT. I have currently no use for most of the options, so settled for the scorm 1.2 package. When I tried to save, it complained about a space in the name, so I changed that.
After uploading to Moodle I ran it and immediately realised that I needed to explore the options more, to turn off link to Index and next exercise, which I promptly did and reuploaded. All worked fine, quite easily really.
Must explore the other applications later, but this has become one of my “will use” applications along with Adobe Presenter, Camtasia and Audacity.
