Hot Potatoes Review

Hot potatoes (HP) is a free educational based software. It can be used by teachers, language instructors, and etc. I have never heard of Hot Potatoes before I entered CALL class. The first time using it, I thought, "this is fun and easy". This is somewhat true. HP is very user friendly. We can prepare an interactive exercise using HP. From HP we can prepare fill in the blank exercise, matching exercise, jumbled sentence exercise, crossword puzzle, and multiple choice or short answer quiz.

All of those exercises can be prepare within one hour or less than that. It saves more time than preparing paper-based exercises (not to mention it saves paper thus saves tree! =)). It is an interactive exercise, because we can add pictures, decorate our own background and include sound effects. Those characteristics are enough to make students thrilled and motivated to learn. In addition, HP enables students to get immediate feedback. Meaning wise, they will be able to check their answer without relying only on teacher. Other than that, HP also can be used even without the internet connection. Most of the schools in Malaysia do not have the internet connection especially in the rural areas. Even if some schools are connected to the internet, most of the time, the connection is usually as slow as snail (like my previous secondary school). However, with HP, teacher still can prepare exercises without the internet connection and students are also able to do the exercise. Next, HP enables us to link one exercise to another. It will be useful as to give different exercises on the same or different topic. Finally, HP can also be use to teach other subject such as Science, History and etc. This is in case, teachers are teaching multiple subjects in school.

By including the use of computer in classroom is enough to grab student’s attention. Even to the students who study in urban areas. When student's attention is grabbed, their attention span will be longer. Thus teaching will be at ease. To be honest, while learning on how to use HP in CALL class, I was wishing that I knew about the software during my practicum. My students would be very excited completing tasks given using this software. If I were to be a teacher in the future, I would definitely use HP. And now, I'm visualizing of giving monthly test using HP. ;)