English lessons are built on reading, talking and writing, and none of those needs a device. So the question for each lesson below is what the technology added.
Often it is a view of what the whole class thinks. Year 10 rate Lady Macbeth's control across two scenes on a Mentimeter scale. Year 11 poll three readings of Kamikaze, debate, and poll again. Year 12 close-read The Waste Land passage by passage in one shared Doc. These sit in Interactive Amplify, the busiest cell on this page.
Often it is a voice and an audience. Year 1 make new-animal versions of Handa's Surprise in Book Creator and read every page aloud. Year 9 record a 90-second podcast review of Of Mice and Men. Writing that someone else will hear tends to get redrafted with more care.
Transform is rarer: a Year 10 data essay on cold and warm words across the five staves of A Christmas Carol, or a Twine story with an unreliable narrator that remembers the reader's choices. For one topic taught in every cell, see persuasive writing, taught nine ways.
Creative Amplify
Each child writes and draws their own four-page version of Eileen Browne's Handa's Surprise with new animals and fruits, then records themselves reading every page and listens back to fix missing words.
Groups write a sentence describing the forest that grows in Max's bedroom in Where the Wild Things Are, post it to a private class Padlet on the board, then improve it after the class compares every sentence.
Groups of three turn a written appeal for the school's charity week into a 60-second radio advert in Soundtrap, redrafting the script each time they hear it played back, and the chosen adverts are played in assembly.
Pairs make a two-page Book Creator spread on one poem from the unit, with their own recorded reading and a commentary on three of the poet's choices, for an anthology the other Grade 7 classes revise from.
Students draft a 150-word persuasive paragraph in a shared class Doc, three named peers comment using a fixed frame, and each writer revises before the bell.
Each student builds a six-slide PowerPoint report on Michael Morpurgo's 'Private Peaceful', including an audio clip of themselves reading a key passage.
Each student scripts and records a 90-second review of 'Of Mice and Men', reading two quotations aloud over a music bed chosen for the novel's tone.
Each student builds a Google Sites page on Owen's poem with their own recorded reading, six tap-to-open annotations and a 200-word essay.
Pairs record a podcast episode in which each partner argues a different reading of duality in Stevenson's novella, backed by quotations read aloud.
Students argue a thesis on a contemporary issue as a Google Sites page, with a short video commentary, links to two primary sources and an argument map that jumps to the evidence.
After an autumn hunt in the school grounds, each child photographs one treasure and records a sentence describing it in their Seesaw journal, then the teacher shares selected pages with families.
Creative Replace
Each student writes and lays out a one-page leaflet in Canva persuading visiting Grade 5 pupils to join one of the school's Grade 6 clubs, printed for the open evening.
Each student types a three-paragraph answer in their own Google Doc on how Shelley presents power in 'Ozymandias', following 'what, how, why' with one quotation in every paragraph.
Creative Transform
Groups write two rival openings for a bulletin article urging pupils to use the new water refill stations, test them on around 200 pupils at a partner school in another town through an anonymous Microsoft Forms survey, and rewrite from the results and from that school's comments on their drafts.
Grade 7 pairs post explanations of Dickinson's 'Hope is the thing with feathers' in answer to questions a Grade 6 class at a partner school left on a staff-run Padlet, then rewrite them twice from Grade 6's replies.
Pairs build the Birlings' dining room in CoSpaces Edu and write two versions of each character's speech, coded so the visitor hears the guarded or the cornered version depending on which clues they have found.
Students count sentences carrying two semantic fields of their choice across the whole of A Christmas Carol in Google Sheets, chart the results stave by stave and build an argument from them.
Students write a Twine short story that stores the reader's choices in variables, so the narrator's account of later scenes changes depending on what the reader did earlier.
Over three lessons, groups build a corpus of 20 Gemini-written film review openings, code it against 20 published openings, and write up what the data shows about machine-written reviews.
Interactive Amplify
Groups drag six pictures onto the digraph they hear (ch, sh, th, ng, ai or ee) in a Seesaw activity, and the teacher projects contrasting responses.
Groups of Kindergarten children post words with the /ai/ sound to a class Padlet on the board, and the teacher sorts them by spelling as they arrive.
Small groups record a turn-by-turn spoken retelling of The Gruffalo in Seesaw, then the class plays two back against a picture story map to check the order and spot missing events.
After reading The Selfish Giant, each pupil posts one sentence on its main idea to a class Padlet, and the teacher uses the range of answers to teach what a main idea is.
Groups drag mood-word labels onto stanzas of Alfred Noyes's The Highwayman on their own Padlet Sandbox card, and the teacher compares the groups' choices in the plenary.
Grade 4 work on Lexia Core5 comprehension activities at their own level while the teacher takes the group the programme's report flagged for a short teacher-led lesson.
Each pupil posts a prediction for the next chapter of Kensuke's Kingdom, the class votes on the likeliest, and after the reading pupils check their predictions against the text.
Students name the device at work in fifteen extracts from charity leaflets and adverts in a self-paced Wayground quiz, acting on instant feedback, while the teacher stops the class to untangle the device most of them are confusing.
Students listen to a recorded reading of Alfred Noyes' The Highwayman in Edpuzzle, answering seven questions that pause the recording, while the teacher watches the answers arrive and sits with those who need another listen.
The class splits into three groups and each student comments on rhetorical devices in one shared Google Doc per speech, ready for a plenary comparison.
Each student analyses one of three contrasting Gothic story openings and posts its structural choices and effects to that opening's column on a class Padlet.
Half the class reads Chopin's The Story of an Hour and half reads Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, and each student posts a narrative-voice label with a justifying quotation to a class Padlet.
Students rate eight quotations from Act 1 Scene 5 and Act 5 Scene 1 on a Mentimeter scale from in control to losing control, and the class argues over the lines where the live averages are contested.
Students commit to one of three readings of Beatrice Garland's Kamikaze on Mentimeter, defend it in pairs, debate, and re-poll to see who changed their mind.
Each student posts a short reading of the opening of Mrs Dalloway through an assigned critical lens, and the teacher pairs clashing readings live.
Interactive Replace
Pairs drag twelve shuffled sentences from a persuasive letter to the council back into order on a Microsoft Whiteboard, then label the job each paragraph does.
Pairs recolour fourteen jumbled sticky notes, one for each line of Christina Rossetti's 'Remember', by the rhyme each ends on, then use the colours and the sense to rebuild the sonnet in FigJam.
Students annotate William Blake's The Tyger in their own Google Doc, using four highlight colours for questions, repetition, fire imagery and forge imagery, then draft a paragraph on what the questions do.
Students read The Empty House, a teacher-written Twine mystery, choosing a route at each of nine branch points and logging their predictions and the tension of each passage in their books.
Pairs drag eighteen sticky notes on a FigJam board into quotation, technique and effect triples from Wilfred Owen's Exposure, then rank the triples by how much work each technique does.
Interactive Transform
A city Grade 6 class and a Grade 6 class at a partner school in Keswick rank the same ten arguments about wind turbines on the Lake District fells, then compare rankings on a staff-hosted Teams call to find out how much the audience decides what persuades.
Pairs search a Google Sheet holding every line of Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, counting and reading the matches to find out how far 'The Tyger' is typical of the book it comes from.
Passive Amplify
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.
Passive Replace
The class watches Michael Rosen perform his poem Chocolate Cake on his YouTube channel, with the teacher replaying short sections so children can hear how he uses pace, pauses and voices.
Students follow a teacher-written model letter arguing for a longer lunch break, shown a paragraph at a time on PowerPoint slides, and log each persuasive device in a table in their books.
Grade 6 watch Rodrigo Blaas's animated short Alma twice on the board and collect setting details in their books before writing their own eerie openings.
Grade 7 meet Blake's 'A Poison Tree' one stanza per slide, writing a prediction in their books before each reveal, and end by explaining how the growing tree stands for the speaker's hidden anger.
The teacher talks Grade 7 through five slides on ethos, pathos and logos before they draft their own persuasive speeches.
The teacher plays a GCSE context video on An Inspector Calls, pausing at each key term so Grade 8 can log it in a vocabulary grid in their books.
Passive Transform
The teacher plays nearly four decades of Google Earth Timelapse imagery of Alaska's Columbia Glacier, and Grade 6 turn what they watched into the evidence paragraph of a persuasive speech.
Grade 7 watch Chrome Music Lab's Spectrogram draw the teacher's voice reading two lines of Owen's 'Anthem for Doomed Youth', one showing as short broken patches of sound and the other as long drawn-out ones.
Lessons that look like one cell but sit in another
Useful counter-examples when you are checking your own lesson placement on the PICRAT grid.
This page is one of a growing set of PICRAT examples by cell, subject and grade. Page maintained by Andy Perryer.