History is a subject of sources, causes and arguments. The technology in a history lesson tends to do one of three things: show students something, collect what they think, or let them build an account of their own. The lessons below, from a Year 2 Pepys diary to Year 13 essay planning, are sorted by which of those is happening.
More of them sit in Interactive Amplify than anywhere else. A Mentimeter scale that asks Year 9 who was to blame after each moment of the July Crisis, or a Padlet column for each of Fischer, Joll and Clark, lets the teacher see every student's judgement at once and teach to it. The task is one a history teacher would set anyway. The technology makes the thinking visible.
Transform is rarer, and in history it usually means evidence at a scale a textbook cannot offer: Year 10 testing the "Bloody Code" against 1,500 Old Bailey trials, or Year 9 reading 1914 newspapers alongside a partner class in Vienna.
The Passive rows are here on purpose. A documentary clip before a significance debate is an honest lesson. To see one topic move across the whole grid, read the causes of the First World War, taught nine ways.
Creative Amplify
The Industrial Revolution: Google Earth project of six stops on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway
Groups of three build a six-stop Google Earth project along the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, writing at each placemark what stood in Stephenson's way and how it was overcome, then test it on another group.
Pairs script and record a five-minute Soundtrap podcast in which one voice argues Fischer's case against Germany and the other Clark's 'sleepwalkers' case, re-recording until each argument lands.
After interviewing community volunteers at a staffed oral-history afternoon, each student builds a timeline of eight events with the witnesses' recorded voices beside the historical context.
Students write a Twine story in which the reader advises Kennedy at three points in October 1962, and each option opens a primary source the reader must weigh before choosing.
Creative Replace
After hearing extracts from Samuel Pepys's diary, each child types their own one-page diary entry as a Londoner on 2 September 1666 in Book Creator, and the pages are printed for the Great Fire display.
Each student designs a one-page notice in Canva, dated 1872, in which Titus Salt's mill invites Bradford workers to move to Saltaire, using five accurate features of the village and one of its rules.
Each student writes a one-page memo to Asquith, dated 2 August 1914, arguing for or against British intervention from the evidence in the source pack.
Creative Transform
Pairs write a 150-word history of one household from their town's 1851 census on a staff-run Padlet, and rewrite it after family history society volunteers reply with records the class does not hold.
Groups build a playable Twine simulation of the July Crisis whose hidden variables carry every decision forward, then play each other's versions to test whether war could have been avoided.
Students trace every name on the town's war memorial in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission database, pool the records in one sheet, chart what they show and publish a school-only memorial site.
Over five lessons, a class studying the American West and a partner class in California build a joint site comparing how Britain saw the Gold Rush in 1849 with how Californians remember it today, each side revising its pages to answer the other's questions.
Students rebuild one stage of the 1914 to 1918 chain of evacuation at full scale in CoSpaces Edu from sources, walk a stretcher carry through it, and use what they find to explain why evacuation was so slow.
Interactive Amplify
Each pair pins its civilisation's heartland and one place it traded with on a class Padlet map, and the class looks for where civilisations met.
Pairs guess the use of a mystery Roman object from a close-up photo, then update their guess on Padlet as the teacher reveals two more clues.
Grade 7 rule on ten cases as factory inspectors in 1840, answering against the 1833 Act, allowed by it or outside it in Wayground, and the teacher reteaches the cases that the class gets wrong most often.
Pairs post a fact and a viewpoint from the 1215 charter and from Roger of Wendover's chronicle to Padlet, and the teacher sets conflicting readings side by side.
After each of five moments in the July Crisis, Grade 8 rate six powers' responsibility on a Mentimeter scale, and the teacher uses the shifts and splits to choose which arguments the class has next.
Two pairs per decade choose the three most significant events from a set of cards and post them to that decade's Padlet column, then defend any choices that differ.
Pairs record a 60-second Mote voice comment analysing extracts from Scheidemann's speech, and the teacher plays contrasting ones back and replies by voice.
Students rate how useful a First World War recruitment poster is for an enquiry, then rate it again once the teacher reveals who made it and why.
Students back one of three historians' interpretations in a Padlet column, and the teacher uses the column sizes to decide who argues first.
A Grade 10 class and a partner school hold a mock hearing on who caused the war in 1914, with advocates, witnesses in role, cross-examiners and a jury drawn from both classes.
Students post a 150-word defence of the orthodox, revisionist or post-revisionist view in that historian's Padlet column, then counter a post in another column.
Students rate the reliability of John Reed's eyewitness account on a Mentimeter scale, the teacher re-teaches provenance from the spread, and students rate again.
Interactive Replace
Pairs work through a branching Microsoft Form on the death of William II in the New Forest in 1100, where each reliability decision sends them to a different source and, in the end, a different verdict.
Each student studies Punch's 1852 cartoon 'A Court for King Cholera' and types answers to six questions in a Microsoft Form, from what they can see to what the cartoonist wanted readers to think.
Each student colour-codes the ten demands of Austria-Hungary's ultimatum by how Serbia answered them, adds margin comments, and judges whether the ultimatum was written to be rejected.
Before writing their causation essay, pairs arrange nine cause cards, each carrying a factual anchor, into a diamond-nine on a Padlet Sandbox board and justify every placement.
Interactive Transform
Pairs filter and count a Google Sheet of about 6,000 people from their own town's 1851 census to test a textbook claim about industrial towns, then put a question of their own to the same records.
Grade 8 and a partner class in Vienna each read their own country's newspapers from three days in 1914, share translations in a Google Doc, and question each other's readings on a staff-hosted Teams call.
Pairs filter and count 1,500 Old Bailey trial records from 1780 to 1800 in Google Sheets to test the claim that most people convicted of theft were sentenced to hang.
A Grade 10 class and a partner class in Germany annotate extracts from each other's history textbooks on Versailles, compare their own judgements of the treaty, and question each other about how they were taught it.
Each student asks Gemini why Germany suffered hyperinflation in 1923, breaks its answer into separate claims, and rules on each one using the class source pack.
Pairs question Gemini about three historians of the English Reformation, try it with repeated and leading questions, and check every claim and quotation against extracts in a shared reliability log.
Passive Amplify
Grade 7 watch a museum film of a restored spinning mule running, replayed by the teacher at quarter speed, and mark on a sketch where the piecer and the scavenger had to work while the carriage moved.
The teacher flies Google Earth along the archduke's route through Sarajevo, drops into Street View at the Latin Bridge corner and zooms out to the capitals of Europe while Grade 8 annotate their own maps.
Passive Replace
Grade 6 watch an eight-minute documentary clip on the Black Death on the board, take structured notes and write a paragraph on the change that mattered most.
Grade 7 follow a teacher-led slide story of the steam engine from Newcomen's mine pump of 1712 to Watt's rotary engine of the 1780s, noting each problem and its fix, then explain why mills could leave the riverbank.
Grade 7 read a teacher-built Sutori timeline of the five Tudor monarchs and fill in a blank timeline in their books before a recall check.
Students read down a teacher-built Sutori timeline of fourteen Industrial Revolution events, answer the questions set at four checkpoints in their books, then rebuild the turning points from memory.
Grade 8 watch a twelve-minute documentary extract on the Anglo-German naval race, taking notes under three headings, and write a paragraph on whether it made war more likely.
The teacher recaps militarism, alliances, imperialism, nationalism and the Sarajevo assassination on six slides, and Grade 8 summarise and rank the causes in their books.
Passive Transform
The Industrial Revolution: watch the queues build in a time-lapse of the class's own production line
Grade 7 work a twenty-minute shift as craft workers or on five-step production lines, every student at a station, then watch the overhead time-lapse paused at two-minute marks to count the queue at each station.
The teacher plays a Sonic Pi sonification of the 1665 London Bills of Mortality, one bar per week and one click for every hundred plague deaths, and the class listens to the epidemic build and fade before reading Pepys.
The teacher sets Stellarium to St Ann's Bay, Jamaica, on the evening of 29 February 1504 and runs time forward so the class watches the eclipsed Moon rise, then tests Ferdinand Columbus's account of how his father used it.
The teacher plays a Sonic Pi piece in which every British and German dreadnought entering service from 1906 to August 1914 sounds as a bell, and Grade 8 judge what the naval race looked like from Britain in 1909.
The teacher plays Google Earth's Timelapse over central Berlin from 1984, and students watch the empty ground where the border cut through Potsdamer Platz persist, then fill with building sites and new blocks through the 1990s.
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.