How can I adapt Hot Potatoes to teach children, teenagers and others?

How can I adapt Hot Potatoes to teach children, teenagers and others?

Hot Potatoes is a tool that 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. Hot Potato is freeware, and you may use it for any purpose or project you like. 

First, it is important to mention that this tool is helpful for teachers of all over the world, and it could make their job easier talking about making test. But, the question is how can they adapt this tool according to students’ ages? Well here is a brief description of how I could do it. 

If I had to teach kids, I would use this tool in order to make them familiar with a specific topic. For example if I were teaching them “Farm Animals”, I would introduce vocabulary using JQuiz, in which there would be a name of a farm animal and when Ss click in one name they could watch the picture of the animal. 

On the other hand if I had to adapt this tool to a group of teenagers, I would use Hot Potato to help Ss understand and be familiar with a topic. Let spouse that I am going to teach the “The use of Present Progressive in Daily Routines”. With this topic I would use JCross, JQuiz, JMatch, JMix and the Masher to teach Ss vocabulary, Tense Structure, a reading exercise, and at the end of the topic I would combine the four tools in order to help Ss practice and also to obtain a media that could show me the advance that my Ss could have in this topic.

And if I had to adapt Hot Potatoes to other people, first, I would like to use all of the tools that Hot Potato has since with adults it could be easier to use it and to make them practice.

In sum, I can say that Hot Potatoes is an interesting program for me because I could use it in deferent ways with my students. Moreover, this program has changed my life as teacher because I am sure that it is going to help me to develop a test in a different manner, I mean it won’t be too monotonous for students to make a test or an exercise if they use this tool.