Hot Potato: A “God” application for making reading exercises?

A well-liked program called Hot Potato makes it simple to make interactive Web-based instructional exercises. The University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Center's Research and Development team created six programs that make up the Hot Potatoes package. Web interactive exams and exercises can only be created using the Hot Potato program by entering data, assigning settings, and publishing them. 

Hot Potato have various advantages for teachers when preparing materials for EFL students. 

The advantages are as follows: 

-) Allow teachers to make little exercises for students to master grammatical concepts. These kinds of activities are included in many examination systems, and they can make students understand grammar more quickly and effectively. When the teacher creates an exercise in Hot Potato, the exercise can be changed to keep them up-to-date. As a result, Hot Potato content will give helpful preparation, at least for the exam. 

-) Hot Potato tools give learners quick feedback for every single question. Students may study the exam items before taking the test, and they can go online and check the HTML sources of their quizzes to get the correct answers. This, in turn, provides for greater autonomy and promotes students' heuristic abilities. The teachers can then incorporate a reading text into the hot potatoes resources by developing them. All Hot Potato applications allow teachers to put reading material in a separate frame adjacent to the quiz. The reading text can be input into the software directly or imported from an external web page. 

Despite of many advantages of using Hot Potato, there are lots of disadvantages to it. Hot Potato is generally form-focused activities with minimal "interaction" between the user and the predetermined feedback produced by the program creator. In this situation, Hot Potato functions as a tool, and it's worth, like that of all other helpful tools, is determined by the pupils' knowledge and creative abilities. Furthermore, the major disadvantage of Hot Potato is the insecurity of the testing. Because the application lacks any type of access control, it should only be utilized in unofficial testing scenarios and student self-evaluation practices. Moreover, Hot Potato is not recommended for online exam. 

In brief, Hot Potato is an application that gives reading exercises in a good way. Students can learn the materials and discuss them with their friends in one quick platform. The level of students that can use this app is from elementary until junior high school and their thinking capability is still in the progress to think critically. The teacher can use this application in the classroom to make students feel engaged in learning especially reading exercises in English. Last, this platform is not a place to give an online exam to students due to the lack of security.