Real classroom lesson ideas that sit in IA, with anti-examples to sharpen your placement.
By Andy Perryer, Head of Digital Learning3 lessons
Interactive Amplify (IA) sits at the Interactive row and Amplify column of the PICRAT grid. Below: real English lessons for KS3 that classify as IA, plus anti-examples that look IA but are not.
Climate persuasive paragraphs with structured peer review
Year 8
· 60 min
· 1 device per student
Each student writes a 150-word persuasive paragraph on a climate change action they want their school to take, in their own page of a shared class Doc. After 25 minutes, three named peers comment on each paragraph using a fixed prompt frame: one rhetorical strength, one rhetorical weakness, one suggested rewrite. Students revise their paragraph in the final 15 minutes based on the three comments.
Pairs annotate a persuasive speech for rhetorical devices
Year 8
· 50 min
· 1 device per student (1:1)
Each student receives a copy of a famous persuasive speech (one of Greta Thunberg at the UN 2019, Malala at the UN 2013, JFK 1961 inaugural). Their copy lives in a shared Google Doc. Using the suggesting-mode comment tool, each student highlights three rhetorical devices (e.g. tricolon, anaphora, contrast) and writes a one-line note explaining the effect on the listener. The class scrolls a master view of all three speeches; the teacher calls out two strong annotations.
Three short story openings, classified by structure
Year 9
· 45 min
· 1 device per student (1:1)
Each student gets one of three short story openings (an in medias res start, a frame narrative start, a slow descriptive start), allocated by the teacher so the class is roughly evenly split. They identify two structural choices the writer made and two effects on the reader, posting each as a sticky note on a shared Padlet column for that opening type. The class then scrolls all three columns and the teacher leads a comparison of how each opening shapes reader expectation.