Hot Potatoes allows teachers to create fill-in-the-gaps activities quickly and easily.

Today I have designed a quiz based on the song Daniel, by Elton John. It contains language that fits perfectly the lesson we’re dealing with in class (3A from English File Upper-Intermediate, about Air Travel). The contents dealt with include vocabulary about planes and airports and also grammar on “so” and “such”.

I have gapped the song selecting those words that are more related to what we did in class.

Jcloze allows pasting text directly from the internet.

The screenshot above shows the gapped words in red. To create a  gap, we must select a word and click on “gap”.

Then we see a screen which allows us to write alternative correct answers and clues

Once we have gapped all the words, we should go to “Configure Output” and choose the options that are appropriate for our activity. For example, we can deactivate the buttons which show hints or which take the user to a page that maybe doesn’t exist, as the screenshot shows:

The tabs “Title / Instructions” and “Other” are also important to customize our activity:

Then we have to embed the video. After finding it on Youtube, we click on “Share”:

Then, choose “Embed” and copy the code:

Finally, in Hot Potatoes, click on the book icon from the toolbar and paste the code:

We can use the html tags <center> and </center> to align the video better once the activity is displayed. We can also reduce the size of the video by typing the values we want. Youtube uses 560 * 315, but it may be a bit too large, so  I used 65% of this, 360 * 202.

The activity looks like that:

If we have access to a Moodle platform and upload our activity there, we will see student results and stats.

I even created a forum where students could suggest more songs related to airports.