about the hotpetato

.In our previous week of class, the professor introduced the software hot potato to us. I've never used that before, however I will use it for my coming teaching profession. It is easy to use, not that complicated even for a girl like who don't know much about computer thing still can easily to handle it and get things done. With the help of hot potato we teachers can create various practice drill such as matching, filling the blanks, cloze, and multiple choice. I think it is particularly useful for those students who are preparing to take TOEFL or ILETS tests. Students have to face a lot of new vocabulary during the test, especially for the new generation of TOEFL test, they have to process the whole exam on computer as well, so that they have to familiar with type and read on the screen. The hot potato is definitely the great tool for them to practice. For the listening drill I can create some cloze to them and then play the audio to them. By means of this students can do the dictation practice and the fast type on computer. The matching items could also be used in reading comprehension, because during the real test they will come across a lot of questions asking about put the sentences into right order according to its means. The hot potato gives more flexibility to us teachers; sometimes it is hard to find appropriate items to fit different levels of students. With the new software we can create the questions fit our requirements. Both teachers and students can benefit from it. The only limit here is that if you want to crate large numbers of items yet short of time, this is going to be a problem. Because the unregister user can only have limited number of items quota, which stops them from making a lot of items.