Hello, classmates and friends!
Welcome to this fantastic and innovative blog by Vicent torrent, Martina Angelini and Mariví Saborit, “Queenglish”, especially created for those of you who want to speak like our dear Elizabeth II.
Since we’ve already done it, we would like to make the most of it sharing with you all some interesting information. For example:
Our Secondary School students are not motivated enough to learn English.
Innovative, isn’t it?
Ok, we haven't discovered America, but something needs to be done about it and, since we as teachers will have to cope with that sooner or later, we better start soon to think about it and to share ideas.
That's the reason why we want to talk now about a program that maybe you all know, but we bet that few of you have bothered finding out how it works: Hot Potatoes.
As you may know, Hot Potatoes is a program that can be used to create our own teaching material. How can this help us to motivate our students? Because using it we will be able to create teaching materials about subjects they are interested in.
For example, and this is a real case:
In a secondary school, a teacher asks his students what kind of music they like. They answer: Lady GaGa. Sad but true. The teacher thinks that, if he plans a listening lesson based on a song of Lady GaGa, maybe his students will listen to it!
That's why we've chosen “Alejandro” to create a listening lesson using Hot Potatoes.
If you want to do it too, the first thing you have to do is to download and install the program from the author's website:
Once you've installed it in your PC, it is very easy to use. As you'll see, the program offers 5 different possibilities of exercises or “potatoes”:
JQuiz (question-based exercises)
JCloze (gapfill exercises)
JMatch (matching exercises)
JMix (jumble exercises)
JCross (crosswords)
The new version, Hot Potatoes 6, also includes “The Masher”. This gives us the possibility to link all the others and create a unit or, for example, a listening lesson.
You only have to click on each one of the potatoes and create the exercise following the instructions.
Here you can find some help if you need it.
Remember it is very very important to create a folder in your PC and keep saving all the materials and exercises you create in it, otherwise the program won't be able to find then when it needs them.
And finally, here you have our sample of a lesson:
And the song (let's hope Mrs. Sinde doesn't close our blog because of this).
Enjoy!
