Yo yo yo we’re kickin’ it old school today.  This rad application has been around for a long time but that doesn’t mean educators should toss it aside because it’s still h-o-t.  Hot Potatoes actually…

Hot Potatoes is freeware that educators can use to create games and other review tools.  Just visit their site and download the free software right onto your computer and start using the 6 applications that come with it.  As it says on the site, Hot Potatoes “enables you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises”.

My personal favorite thing to do with Hot Potatoes is creating cloze activities with the gap-fill option.  I’ve used this to create basic grammar drills and I’ve also used it for cloze song activities.  I take lyrics from French songs and then create blanks with drop-down menus for students to complete.  Once again, this is a fun tool that becomes even better when you throw in an interactive whiteboard.

Here’s a link to another teacher who has used this tool in a very impressive way, mostly with music.