This week I was asked about an easy way to make an interactive activity in which students would be able to match equations with graphs or descriptions with graphs. I knew that there had to be an easy way to do this that didn’t involve having to know anything about java or any other type of code. My first thought was to use Sharendipity. However, that didn’t work out because I couldn’t figure out how to build a game from scratch in which I would be able to upload my own images of graphs and equations.
After a week-long search, I remembered about a program called Hot Potatoes. The only other time I had used this program was when I was creating an online course using Moodle in graduate school. Moodle has Hot Potatoes integration, but the integration didn’t work the way it should have worked. Thus, I abandoned Hot Potatoes.
However, after revisiting Hot Potatoes this week, I realized that Hot Potatoes works great as a standalone program. Of course, this means that you need to have your own space on the web to post your interactive activities once they are done. To this end, I recommend that you do Jing your images and embed them into Hot Potatoes using the stable URL. This way you won’t have to store the images on your own space.
This is a link to my Sample Matching Activity that I created using Hot Potatoes. You may also want to mess around with the settings and tweak things such as whether or not the buttons at the top of the page appear or not. Good luck! And if you decide to use make some Interactives of your own, I would love to see them!
