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 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 enhancement 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
teaching 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:
- 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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 of 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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