Geography may be the subject technology suits best, because so much of the world can now be watched as it happens.
Some of that is simply looking, and it is still powerful. Year 8 watch four decades of Amazon deforestation in Google Earth Timelapse. Year 11 watch Hurricane Dorian stall over warm water. Students are Passive, but no textbook could have shown them this, which is why these lessons sit in Passive Transform.
Hand the same tools to students and the lesson lands in a different cell. Year 10 measure cliff retreat at Happisburgh on historical imagery, build a live storm hydrograph for the River Severn at Bewdley from river gauge data, or test whether Africa is 'switched off' from global air links on Flightradar24.
Partner classes do something similar for human geography. Year 2 compare playground weather with a class in Nairobi, and Year 10 trace the fashion trade through a clothing-label survey with a school in Accra. For one topic taught in every cell, see the water cycle, taught nine ways.
Creative Amplify
Fifteen pairs each survey one habitat zone across a week, then add a placemark to a shared Google Earth project with photos of what they found and their own notes.
Each child pins four public landmarks on a class Padlet map, adding a photo and a short recorded explanation of what happens there.
Pairs write and illustrate a six-page Book Creator book following one drop of water round the water cycle, recording their own narration on each page for Grade 1 to listen to.
Groups measure temperature and wind at six spots in the school grounds, take a 360 photo at each, and build a CoSpaces Edu tour where visitors click to hear why each spot is warmer, colder or more sheltered.
After a river fieldwork day, students build a CoSpaces Edu tour from 360 photos of four sites, with their width, depth and velocity data and a recorded commentary at each.
After a class visit to one regeneration site, each student builds a Google Earth project that pairs historical imagery with their own photos and data at five waypoints.
Students build a web page comparing a tropical rainforest and a hot desert, with climate graphs embedded from Google Sheets and collapsible explanations beside each.
Creative Replace
After walking the classroom, each child draws a bird's-eye map of it in Microsoft Paint with rectangles for tables and a key for the door, windows, sink and book corner, and the printed maps are used in a hunt next lesson.
Each child makes a one-page explanation poster of the water cycle in Adobe Express, with a diagram and four short numbered paragraphs, printed for the Grade 2 corridor.
Creative Transform
Groups take temperature readings around the school vegetable beds for a week with micro:bits, then code an alarm that shows a snowflake, and keeps showing it, once the temperature falls below a level they chose from their readings.
Pairs program a Scratch model of the water cycle in which a sun slider sets how fast water evaporates, the cloud grows until it is full, and rain falls back to the rivers and sea.
Six groups code micro:bits to send sound levels by radio from different parts of the school, the class watches the readings arrive as a live graph, and they build a noise map from it.
Pairs type a fortnight of their own weather-station readings into Scratch lists and code an animated report whose rain, cloud, wind and presenter's advice are decided by the numbers, then run it on each new day's readings.
Students measure the cliff edge at Happisburgh on dated satellite images in Google Earth, pool their readings in a class sheet to calculate rates of retreat, and build a mapped judgement on the shoreline policy.
Students pull four weeks of 15-minute river level and rainfall readings from the Environment Agency into Google Sheets, build their own storm hydrograph and write a flood briefing for Bewdley.
Over a week, groups follow a named hurricane as it happens, updating a Google Site each lesson with its position, pressure and winds from Windy and the sea temperature beneath it from earth.nullschool, and forecasting its next move.
Interactive Amplify
Pairs answer a twelve-question live Kahoot built on common water cycle misconceptions, and the teacher stops after any question most pairs get wrong to settle it with a quick demonstration.
Each student pins a named hazard event on a shared Padlet map with a one-line summary, and the class watches patterns such as the Ring of Fire appear as the pins arrive.
Grade 8 drop into Street View at three saved places in Mumbai, look around and move along the streets, and record evidence for a written comparison.
Each student places an unlabelled population pyramid in a demographic transition stage column on a class Padlet, and the teacher reveals the countries after discussing the disagreements.
Students vote on the future of Happisburgh's coastline, post stakeholder arguments to a Padlet, then re-vote before the teacher shows the actual plan.
Students answer Copilot's questions on Typhoon Haiyan one at a time, read its feedback on each answer, and check that feedback against the textbook case study before correcting their notes.
Each student pins a real migration flow on a class Padlet map and colour-codes its main push or pull factor, so the class pattern builds as the pins go in.
Students rate ten climate change sources as high, medium or low reliability in Microsoft Forms, and the teacher uses the live summary to pick the most disputed ones.
After both schools have measured a local river, a Grade 10 class pools its channel data with a partner school's in one sheet, tests both rivers against the Bradshaw model and questions the other class's methods.
Students post three hypotheses for the class's practice fieldwork site to a Padlet, three named peers comment on each, and students revise their preferred one.
Students comment on the most and least convincing lines of an extract about Bangladesh's garment industry, reply to classmates who disagree, and the plenary runs from the longest threads.
Interactive Replace
Children drag eight labels and four arrows onto a picture of sea, hills and sky in a Seesaw activity, then write under it how the water moves round the loop.
Students fly to eight teacher-chosen coordinates in Google Earth, identify the biome at each from what the imagery shows, and record two pieces of visual evidence in a table.
Students work through a self-paced set of 20 four-figure, six-figure and map-symbol questions on Wayground, the same set the department ran as a Kahoot challenge last year.
Students open Windy's pressure layer, find today's highs and lows over the North Atlantic and answer the department's standard chart-reading questions from the isobars.
Pairs switch between wind, pressure, rain and wave layers to complete the scheme of work's data table for a named tropical storm, then predict which stretch of coast takes the worst of it.
Interactive Transform
On a January morning, Grade 1 read the playground thermometer at the same moment as a partner class in Nairobi, then compare readings, clothes and questions on a staff-hosted Teams call.
Pairs spin a live globe on earth.nullschool to find where the air is holding the most water right now, check whether the sea beneath is warm, and follow that wet air to where it is raining.
Students at a UK school and a partner school in Accra log the labels of their own clothes in one shared sheet and each describe their own end of the second-hand clothing chain, so both classes can trace where clothes are made, worn and resold.
For the last two weeks of January, a UK class and a partner class in Cape Town take the same noon shadow and temperature readings into one shared sheet, then use the data to explain opposite seasons.
Pairs compare what Flightradar24's live map shows over Africa with the departure boards of eight airports, to decide whether empty patches of map mean no flights or no receivers, and test the claim that Africa is 'switched off'.
Passive Amplify
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.
Passive Replace
The teacher talks through a PowerPoint of eight photographs taken around the school, from a drying puddle to a misted window, and children copy and label the cycle in their books.
The teacher plays a 12-minute section of a documentary podcast episode on daily life in Lagos through the classroom speakers while Grade 7 take notes under set headings.
Grade 7 read a two-page Google Doc on why people live where they do, then shade a world outline map in their books to show dense and sparse regions.
The teacher plays a vetted clip on waterfalls and meanders from YouTube on the board, pausing after each landform while Grade 8 take notes, then they draw an annotated oxbow lake sequence.
Passive Transform
The class watches a time-lapse of their own water-cycle bag, taped to a sunny window and filmed by a school tablet across a whole school day, as droplets form, grow and run back down.
The teacher plays Google Earth's Timelapse of Rondônia on the board so Grade 7 watch the forest being cleared year by year since the 1980s.
The teacher shows Windy's animated wind, pressure and rain layers for a real depression approaching the UK, and Grade 7 watch the air spiral into the low.
The teacher shows near-real-time ocean currents and sea surface temperatures on earth.nullschool, following the Gulf Stream from Florida to the North Atlantic Drift off Ireland, while the class compares Britain with Labrador on the same latitude.
The teacher plays nearly four decades of Timelapse imagery of the Ucayali River in Google Earth, and students watch meander loops creep sideways, pinch together and leave ox-bow lakes behind.
The teacher sets earth.nullschool to early September 2019 and steps Hurricane Dorian forward a day at a time, showing its winds and then the sea temperatures beneath it, while students watch the storm sit over warm water and loosen over cooler seas.
In a morning lesson the teacher opens Flightradar24 on the board, and students watch aircraft converge on London from North America, Asia and Africa as evidence of the UK's links with the wider world.
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.