We developed www.learnclick.com for easily creating gap-filling and other types of quizzes. The tool is especially loved by language teachers. I recently used it myself while teaching my Korean brother-in-law English with Skype.
This is how it can be done: During a Skype or Zoom class take notes of areas where the student had difficulties and of mistakes he made. Based on that create a few example sentences. Using learnclick.com you can create a quiz with a few mouse clicks in minutes which you can then share with your student. You can also create a username for your student so that the answers he gives get recorded.
Your students will appreciate this type of review and it will help you as teacher to make lessons more individual, based on the students needs.
Language testing is where learnclick.com most differentiates from other quiz makers, because it is so easy to create tests around texts, like gap-filling exercises, drag & drops or matching exercises which is especially useful for testing vocabulary and grammar.
Create sections that focus on vocabulary, reading comprehension, grammar and writing. If you have the answers recorded, you can get a quick overview of where your students weaknesses are. A test should be constructed with the goal of having students learn from their weaknesses.
Choose topics that interest your students. With learnclick.com you can insert pictures and sound files which also makes the tests more interesting.
The idea for Learnclick started as a tool for learning languages rather than teaching them. The objective was to build a tool that would help people learn things in context. The tool which I called “cloze test flashcards” didn’t turn out to interest many students at the time, but some teachers discovered it and they liked how easy it was for creating clozes.
One teacher wrote: “In terms of potential additional features to the site, I’d love to be able to create clozes that are longer than flashcards. The way I use clozes, and the way many other teachers use them, is as a vehicle to teach students that clues to what words belong in the blank can be anywhere in the reading passage — several sentences in front and several later. Only being able to create a cloze as a flashcard severely limits their usefulness.”
That is when I realized that there was a potential market and that I should gear the website towards teachers instead of students. I added other quiz types like drag&drop, matching and multiple choice quizzes. I added the ability to have the quizzes automatically assessed and for those grades to be saved. I asked teachers what features they miss and added them over time.
First click on the icon with the tree to insert the image.
Click on the icon behind File/URL to upload an image. You will need to click on the tab “Upload” and after you uploaded it go back to “Browse” where you can choose to uploaded file to insert.
You can click on the tab “Appearance” to align your image left or right of the text and add some space between the text and the image.
Hot Potatoes is a set of 6 authoring tools that lets you save your exercises as web pages. Although it’s no longer developed (or at least the developers are staying quiet), it is still being used by many teachers. There are some things that learnclick.com can do that Hot Potatoes can’t and other things that Hot Potatoes might still be better suited for. I’m going to give a little overview of the differences.
One of the main differences is that Hot Potatoes is a program that you have to download and run on your computer. Hot Potatoes is freeware, so that’s probably a plus for many. But you need to find a place to store your quizzes. With learnclick.com, creating the quizzes and storing them is all in one place. If learnclick.com would cease to exist, then your quizzes are lost (except that you save them as a pdf file). With Hot Potatoes you can save the generated html files on your computer so that’s the second advantage you have. However, with learnclick.com your quizzes remain visible forever to your users after only subscribing for a year-subscription twice (see subscription faqs). You can also easily embed learnclick.com quizzes into your own website using a simple code. If you subscribe for the learnclick.com Pro membership, you get detailed results of how well your students performed. You could upload your Hot Potatoes quizzes to hotpotatoes.net if you want to see the results, but a year subscription costs more than twice compared to learnclick.com and it’s not possible to compare the results given by your students easily.
These are the 6 Hot Potatoes authoring tools:
JCloze: If you want to create cloze tests, then you will find that learnclick.com probably beats Hot Potatoes’ JCloze with its functionality and ease for creating tests. JCloze also doesn’t give you the option for creating drag&drop items or individual dropdowns. Moreover I didn’t find some configuration options learnclick.com offers, like an option to configure the number of attempts a user can have to submit the answers.
JQuiz: This corresponds to “Create a Multiple Choice Quiz” on learnclick.com. The functionality is similar, but personally I believe that creating a quiz on learnclick.com is quicker and easier.
JMatch: Using the cloze test creator on learnclick.com, you can also create matching exercises.
JCross: Learnclick doesn’t offer a tool to create crosswords, but I’ve come across other online tools with which you can create online crosswords.
JMix: With JMix you can create jumbled-sentece exercises. If you want to do the same with learnclick.com, just mark all the words in the cloze creator as a gap-word and choose drag&drop as the exercise mode.
Conclusion: Most things Hot Potatoes can do, can be done with learnclick.com or other online tools. Hot Potatoes takes more time to learn and unlike learnclick.com doesn’t anymore provide support. Some of the things come down to personal choice, for example the exercises created with learnclick.com look more modern in my opinion. If you care about having your quizzes saved on your computer, Hot Potatoes is currently the only option I know of. If you want to see how well your students performed, learnclick.com does a better job. Learnclick.com is continuously getting better, so please let us know which features Hot Potatoes provides that you miss on learnclick.com.
