Creating interactive materials for the ESL /ELT classroom

Creating interactive materials for the ESL /ELT classroom: "Creating interactive materials for ESL/ ELT

By Agata Zieba-Warcholak a former winner of the Lesson share competition



The Advantages of computer-based teacher-created materials | Hot Potatoes | Using the Quizzes



The World Wide Web offers ESL teachers and students hundreds of tests and quizzes. Many of them are of good quality and user-friendly but after a while teachers usually start to create their own quizzes because the ones they find on the Internet do not satisfy their needs.


The Advantages of computer-based teacher-created materials



The advantages of using computer-based teacher-created materials are numerous:

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Interactive exercises increase motivation when the material is directly linked to the course and/or interests of your students.
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The exercises are game-like and fun.
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The students can work through the exercise taking as much time as they need and learning as they go.
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They receive immediate, frequent and non-judgmental feedback.

If you feel you'd like to have a try and make exercises for your students but you don't know how to start you will find some information in this article.


Hot Potatoes



The tool for creating interactive quizzes I like best is the Hot Potatoes suite, created by Stewart Arneil and Martin Holmes at the University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre. Use of the suite is free as long as you do not make money with it and you are prepared to share your exercises by placing them on a publicly accessible Web server but you need to register in order to be able to use the full version of the programs (the registration is free). The applications are logical and easy to use and the output (the web page with the exercises) is really impressive.



The Hot Potatoes suite includes six applications which you can use to create many variations of interactive quizzes such as:

1.

Short-answer quizzes (JQuiz) where the students answer questions by typing their answers. View example
2.

Crosswords (JCross) where you can use definitions, translation or even pictures as clues. View example (definitions)
View example (pictures)
3.

Multiple-choice quizzes (JBC) which can be easily"