Many generous people have made their applications available for download over the internet. Here is a selection of applications that are useful for creating language learning material.

Making web-based exercises

My own favourite is Hot Potatoes from the University of Victoria Language Centre. http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/halfbaked/
Hot Potatoes is a freeware authoring suite that "includes six applications, enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short answer, jumbled sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web"

The Game-o-matic site  http://clear.msu.edu/dennie/matic/ also provides a set of Wizards to create web-based activities for language learning. These programs were written by Dennie Hoopingarner of the Center for Language   Education And Research at Michigan   State Univerisity .

Making Worksheets

Try Discovery School's Puzzlemaker http://puzzlemaker.school.discovery.com/ which allows you to make crosswords, mazes, wordsearches  and much more with your own wordlists.

Cf. Stewart Arneil & Martin Holmes, "Juggling Hot Potatoes: decisions and compromises in creating authoring tools for the Web" in ReCALL 11:2 (1999) 12-19
The software suite Hot Potaotes is a set of authoring tools for creating interactive exercises for the World Wide Web. The suite arose intitially out of their own needs at the Univ of Victoria. In 1997 the use of web pages in support of educational courses was already widespread and they found themselves with the need to create a wide range of interactive exos for the Web. The integrated authoring suite was made availabale for Mac and PC as freeware in April 1998. There are now over 400 registered users worldwide. In their conclusion they provide the following questions to think about when evaluating authoring software for the Web:

• Do the tools make intelligent use of the medium (ie. Do they make best use of the capabilities of web technology, or do they encourage the creation of "one-click right-wrong" exercises)?
• Can both novices and experts do what they need to do without help?
• Do the languages, character sets and data types (pictures, sounds etc.) that you need to use work reliably on an acceptable range of browsers and/or operating systems?
• Are there verions of the tools that run on all the platforms your institution would like to support?
• If you need to use versions of more than one platform, how easy will it be for staff to move from one to the other, and how easy is it to move data between them?
• Will your materials creators need the support of experts and/or specialised plug-ins or software to create, maintain or deliver the exercises?