Real classroom lesson ideas that sit in Passive Amplify, grouped by subject. Plus a few anti-examples to sharpen your placement.
By Andy Perryer, Director of Education Innovation28 lessonsReviewed September 2026
Passive Amplify sits at the Passive row and the Amplify column of the PICRAT grid. Students are still watching, listening or reading, but the technology is adding something to that: a closer view, a commentary, captions, or a version pitched at the right level.
Year 2 study the brushstrokes in The Starry Night, zoomed on the board. Year 8 watch a live microscope view of a leaf's stomata. Year 7 listen to the teacher's Mote voice notes on each section of 'The Listeners'. Year 9 read the story of the langar in versions matched to their reading level.
The test for this cell is simple. Take the technology away and the lesson still runs, but something is lost: the detail nobody at the back could see, or the explanation that sat beside the text. If nothing is lost, the lesson is Passive Replace. If the lesson cannot run at all, it is Passive Transform.
The teacher zooms slowly into The Starry Night on Google Arts & Culture so the class can see the swirls and thick dabs of paint, before children practise the same marks with oil pastels.
The teacher takes the class round the ancient theatre at Epidaurus through 360-degree views in Google Earth, from the circular orchestra to the top rows of seats, before groups stage a chorus in the studio.
The teacher zooms into high-resolution images of Bauhaus objects, from Marianne Brandt's tea infuser to Marcel Breuer's tubular steel chairs, while Grade 10 note the design decisions behind each one.
Grade 3 listen to the teacher's recorded reading of The Iron Man's first chapter in Book Creator, with a voice note beside each hard word, replaying pages as they need.
Grade 5 watch a coral reef extract from Our Planet in Edpuzzle, where the teacher's recorded voice notes stop the video at five points to model an inference.
The teacher steps through eight saved drafts of a persuasive paragraph in Google Docs version history, so the class watches a flat opening become a sharp one change by change.
Students follow Walter de la Mare's 'The Listeners' in a Google Doc and listen through the teacher's Mote voice notes, one reading the whole poem and one on each section, before writing about who the listeners are.
Grade 7 listen to the 1890 wax-cylinder recording of Tennyson reading 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', replayed by the teacher, and mark on printed copies where his voice lands hardest in each line.
The teacher shows a filmed stage production of the opening storm scene twice, first for the chaos and then with closed captions on, so students can catch the lines the storm is meant to drown out.
The teacher reads W. H. Auden's 'Musée des Beaux Arts' aloud and zooms into Landscape with the Fall of Icarus on Google Arts & Culture at each detail the poem names.
The teacher reads a Book Creator retelling of The Three Billy Goats Gruff that she made with her own drawings, and plays a recorded trip-trap for each goat that gets heavier every time.
On a showery morning the teacher opens Windy's cloud and rain layers on the board so Grade 4 watch cloud and rain moving in from the Atlantic towards their own school.
Grade 7 watch a museum film of a restored spinning mule running, replayed by the teacher at quarter speed, and mark on a sketch where the piecer and the scavenger had to work while the carriage moved.
The teacher flies Google Earth along the archduke's route through Sarajevo, drops into Street View at the Latin Bridge corner and zooms out to the capitals of Europe while Grade 8 annotate their own maps.
The teacher drags a GeoGebra slider that re-cuts a shaded bar into more and more equal parts while the shaded amount stays fixed, and Grade 3 watch 3/4 become 6/8, 9/12 and 12/16.
Grade 4 watch the teacher drag a GeoGebra rectangle whose perimeter stays at 20 cm, predicting on mini whiteboards what happens to its area as it changes from 1 cm by 9 cm to a 5 cm square.
Before practising underarm throws at hoops, children watch a short coaching clip at half speed on the hall screen, paused at step, swing, release and follow-through, and hold each position as a statue.
Before their first circuit, students watch a clip on how the heart responds to exercise in Edpuzzle, at their own pace, with the teacher's recorded voice notes at five points linking it to the circuit.
Each student reads the same account of Guru Nanak, Guru Amar Das and the langar, in one of three versions the teacher prepared with Gemini at different reading levels, plus a checked Polish version for a student new to English.
Grade 3 watch three short clips the teacher has chosen, molten iron being poured, a gallium spoon melting in warm water and liquid nitrogen boiling in a bowl, and place each material on a temperature line in their books.
Grade 6 watch the teacher's narrated PowerPoint, exported as a video, that traces blood through the heart with a recorded heartbeat, pausing at three points to sketch the route.
Before making their own leaf peels, Grade 7 watch the teacher's microscope view of stomata and guard cells, sent live from a tablet camera to the board.
The teacher shows NASA's live view of Earth from the ISS on the board, pointing out clouds, coastlines and the thin atmosphere, with a recorded clip ready if the feed drops.
Students read a teacher-written Google Doc on the carbon cycle and listen to a short Mote voice note from the teacher beside each of its four diagrams, before drawing the cycle from memory in their books.
The teacher explains specific heat capacity from a slide deck with PowerPoint's live subtitles running, so every student, including those new to English, can read each sentence on screen as it is spoken.
The teacher streams the demonstration microscope's view to the board through a tablet camera and stops on a cell at each stage of mitosis in an onion root tip while students draw what they see.
At the start of the practical lesson, students watch a titration video in Edpuzzle where the teacher's own voice notes pause it at each step to point out the mistakes that cost marks.
During a space topic, Reception watch NASA's live video from the International Space Station, spotting sea, cloud and land that the station is passing over at that moment, and look again after lunch to see how the view has changed.
Open Generate, pick a subject and an age range, and you will get a full 3x3 matrix of nine lesson ideas in under a minute. Passive Amplify is one of the nine.