Are you tired of searching high and low for that “perfect” exercise for your students to do online? Do you find that although there’s a lot of good stuff out there – there’s nothing that exactly fits the needs of your particular mix of students at this particular time in their learning?

Well, since you know your students, your curriculum and what they need better than anyone else – I think you should be creating those online exercises.

It is incredibly easy. Really. I swear on my Starbucks mug – so you know I really mean it.

If you’ve read my earlier blogs, you may remember me mentioning that I use Moodle extensively with my grade 8 students. Now I'd like to share with you how increadibly easy it is to fill your Moodle or "virtual classroom",  with your own professional looking interactive crosswords, matching, cloze and multiple choice quizzes by using a freeware program called Hot Potatoes. 

By the way, you don’t have to have a Moodle site to use Hot Potatoes – Hot Potatoes is a program that you download to your computer and use to create exercises that you then save in a file on your computer. You then upload those files to your Moodle or website and then direct your students there to enjoy them.

The program really is so user-friendly, and there are so many good tutorials on the net too (the one I provide a link to below is the best one, I think), that I can almost promise you that if you start now, you’ll have your very first interactive exercises up and running for your students to enjoy in only a couple of hours.

As with everything in life, the first time is the hardest and then it just gets easier and easier.

Once you get the hang of it you can start adding all sorts of interesting “extras” to your exercises. You can for instance easily add a reading text, an audiofile, an image, an animation or a video that you want the students to have a look at before attempting the exercise.

Here’s what you need to do:

1.       Download and install Hot Potatoes on your computer http://hotpot.uvic.ca/

2.       Work through the following tutorial  http://hotpot.uvic.ca/wintutor6/tutorial.htm

3.       Create & upload your exercises to your website or Moodle

4.       Write me a note and tell me what you think ;-)

Good Luck!