Hot Potatoes (halfbaked potatoes)

As far as the use of authoring tools is concerned, the group dealing with data-driven learning at Workshop 8/2000 decided to start with the freeware Hot Potatoes suite. Ths tool was chosen, because it is not only easy to use but also available for free for educational institutions. You can visit the halfbaked potatoes website at the University of Victoria (Canada) and download the software from there. All you have to do then is to register and get a registration key. Hot Potatoes remains free of charge for non-profit educational users who make their pages available on the web.

An important aspect is that the team behind the authoring suite keeps adding to the authoring tools. A new applications under development by the Hot Potatoes team is the Quandary, an authoring tool for creating Web-based action mazes. Also, the multimedia potential of Hot Potatoes is constantly being expanded.

• Halfbaked Potatoes. The freeware Hot Potatoes suite includes six applications, enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web.
• Sample exercises: an important service provided by the Hot Potatoes team is a list of links into Sites & Exercises built with Hop Potatoes around the world. This list is regularly updated and added to.
• The English Zone: an intertesting site which can be referred to as a sample for others intending to create learning materials and sites for language learning with Hot Potatoes.

Other Authoring Tools for CALL Software are listed on the following Website:

• AUTHORING TOOLS FOR CALL COURSEWARE: There are several commercially available Web-development tools that are not specifically designed to create language lessons. Since none of them contain any predefined templates authors have to develop all lesson components using tools that were not especially designed for this task.