Passive Amplify Science lessons for middle school.

Year 7 are meeting the heart for the first time. The teacher has recorded narration onto a 12-slide PowerPoint, exported it as a video and shared it through the class's usual learning platform. It traces blood from the vena cava through the right side of the heart to the lungs, back into the left side and out through the aorta, with a recorded 'lub-dub' heartbeat playing as each set of valves snaps shut. At three points the narration asks students to pause the video and sketch the route so far on a blank heart diagram in their books. Students watch on their own devices with headphones, rewinding any part they miss, and the teacher finishes with a whole-class check of the completed diagrams.

Tools: PowerPoint Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Before Year 8 make their own nail-varnish peels of a leaf's lower surface, the teacher shows them what they are looking for. A school tablet on a clamp stand sits over the eyepiece of the demonstration microscope, and its camera view is mirrored to the board at 400 times magnification. The class watches as the teacher moves across a peel from a privet leaf, stops on a pair of guard cells around an open stoma, focuses up and down, and then swaps to a peel from the upper surface of the same leaf, where there are far fewer stomata. Students sketch a stoma and its guard cells in their books from the board and write a sentence on why most stomata are on the underside, then make and examine their own peels at the class microscopes.

Tools: Built-in camera (slow motion and time-lapse) Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 8 are studying Earth in space. The teacher checks the station's position on NASA's tracker beforehand and times the lesson so it is over the daylit side, then shows the live Earth view on the board for about 15 minutes, with a recorded ISS clip ready in case the feed drops to a loss-of-signal screen, which happens often. As Earth moves past, the teacher points out cloud systems, coastlines, the thin blue band of the atmosphere at the planet's edge and, if the station crosses it during the lesson, the line between day and night. Students note what they see in their books, then use the teacher's figures (the station orbits about 400 km up at roughly 28,000 km/h, once every 90 minutes or so) to work out how many sunrises the crew see each day. The lesson ends with a discussion of how thin the atmosphere looks compared with the size of the planet.

Tools: ISS live video Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 9 are learning how carbon moves between the atmosphere, living things, the oceans and fossil fuels. The teacher has written a two-page Google Doc with four diagrams, covering photosynthesis, respiration and decomposition, the oceans as a carbon store, and the combustion of fossil fuels, and attached a Mote voice note of under a minute beside each diagram talking through what its arrows show. Students read the Doc and play each voice note through headphones as they reach it, replaying any they need. They then close the Doc and draw a labelled carbon cycle diagram in their books from memory, checking it against the Doc at the end. The teacher uses this as the reading lesson before next week's practical on limewater and exhaled breath.

Tools: Google Docs, Mote Nine ideas for your own version in Generate