Interactive Replace (IR) sits at the Interactive row and Replace column of the PICRAT grid. Below: real Geography lessons for KS3 that classify as IR, plus anti-examples that look IR but are not.
Google Earth biome hunt replacing the atlas grid-reference exercise
Year 7 are mapping the world's biomes. The teacher gives eight coordinate points, and students fly to each in Google Earth, look at what the land actually shows, canopy, sand sea, tundra mottle, irrigated fields against desert, and fill a table: location, biome, and two pieces of visual evidence for the identification. Point six is deliberately ambiguous, a savanna-forest boundary, to force the vocabulary of transition zones.
The plenary asks students to defend their point-six answer from the evidence column, which is where the lesson stops being about naming and starts being about reading landscapes. The predecessor exercise used an atlas, grid references and a shaded biome map; students found the square, read the shading and copied the label. Same table, better evidence.
Tools: Google Earth
Reading pressure systems on Windy instead of paper synoptic charts
Year 8 are learning how pressure differences drive wind. Each student opens Windy on their iPad with two layers, wind animation and mean sea-level pressure, and a question sheet in their books. The questions are the department's standard chart-reading set: locate the deepest low pressure on the Atlantic, estimate its central pressure from the isobars, describe the wind direction around it, and find somewhere on Earth where the isobars are widely spaced and the air is nearly still.
Students toggle the layers themselves, zoom where they need to, and check the wind-around-a-low rule against what the animation actually shows. The lesson closes with the classic question, why does the wind spiral rather than flow straight from high to low, seeded by what they have just seen. The photocopied synoptic chart from a fixed Tuesday in 2014 has finally been retired.
Tools: Windy
Tracking a named storm across Windy layers
Year 9 are building their tropical storms case study. When a named storm is active, the class uses it live; otherwise the teacher uses Windy's recent archive of a landfalling system. Pairs complete the case-study data table from the scheme of work: central pressure, peak sustained wind, rainfall intensity at the eyewall, sea state at the coast, and the distance from eye to the edge of gale-force winds, measured with the map's own scale.
Each value lives on a different layer, so pairs navigate between wind, pressure, rain and waves, and the table forces the connections: pressure falls, wind rises, the rain wraps the eye. The final question asks pairs to predict which coastal town takes the worst of it and defend the prediction from two layers. The printed pack of six weather-map snapshots this replaces is still in the cupboard, unmissed.
Tools: Windy
This page is one of a growing set of PICRAT examples by cell, subject and key stage. Page maintained by Andy Perryer.