Hot Potatoes is a free desktop tool for building interactive language exercises, and JCloze — its cloze (fill-in-the-blank) activity — is one of the easiest to get started with. Paste in a transcript, choose which words to blank out, and export a self-checking HTML activity students can complete right in their browser.

Why use this tool?

JCloze turns any listening or reading passage into an instantly checkable activity: students type in the missing words, hit Check, and get a percentage score back immediately. It works well paired with a listening source (like an Ello conversation), since students can listen to the audio and fill in the gaps as they go.

You get two ways to create the gaps: manually selecting exactly which words to blank out for full control, or using auto-gap to remove every nth word automatically for a quicker, less curated version of the same activity. Either way, the final result exports to a standalone HTML file that runs in any browser — no login or account needed for students to use it.

How to use it

1. Open Hot Potatoes and choose JCloze. From the main menu, select the JCloze activity type.
2. Paste in your text. Copy a transcript or passage — for example, from a listening source like Ello — and paste it into the JCloze editor.
3. Create gaps manually. Highlight a word and click "Gap" to turn it into a blank. Repeat for each word you want students to fill in. You can also add clues or alternative accepted answers for each gap if you'd like.
4. Or use auto-gap instead. Click Auto Gap and set an interval (e.g. every seventh word) to have Hot Potatoes generate gaps automatically. You can still remove or adjust individual auto-generated gaps afterward.
5. Save the metafile. Save your work as a .jcl file — this is the editable project file, not the final activity, so you can come back and revise it later.
6. Export to HTML. Click the export/web button to generate an HTML version of the activity with the same name.
7. Open and test it in a browser. Open the exported HTML file in Chrome (or your preferred browser) to try the activity — fill in the blanks, hit Check, and confirm the scoring works as expected.

Because the .jcl metafile stays editable, you can always go back, clear all the gaps, and try a different gapping pattern — comparing a manually gapped version against an auto-gapped one takes just a couple of minutes.