Most lesson plans get rewritten three times before they ship. Once because the activity is not quite right. Once because the technology feels bolted on. Once because the timing falls apart. PICRAT cuts that down. You write the lesson, place it on the 3x3 grid, and decide if where it sits is where you want it. If not, you nudge it.
Ten minutes from blank page to a defensible plan. Here is how, with one Year 7 history lesson in three drafts.
The setup
Year 7. History. The Norman Conquest, lesson three of the unit. The class has met 1066 already; today's job is to look at how William consolidated power. Forty minutes. One iPad per pair. The teacher has thirty minutes to plan it on a Tuesday evening.
That is the lesson. Same teacher, same class, same forty minutes. Three different ways it could go.
Draft one: Passive Replace
The teacher pulls up a slide deck. Slide one is the date and learning objective. Slide two has a paragraph from the textbook about the feudal system. Slides three to seven walk through castle-building, the Domesday Book and the harrying of the north. Each slide has one image and a short paragraph. The class reads along on their iPads while the teacher narrates. At the end, students answer three multiple-choice questions on a Google Form.
That lesson sits in Passive Replace. Students are passive: they read and they listen. The technology replaces something analogue. The iPad replaces a paper textbook. The Google Form replaces a paper exit ticket. Nothing about the technology has changed what the lesson asks of the students. The same lesson on paper would teach roughly the same thing.
PR is the most common cell in real classrooms. It is not always wrong. For a recap lesson with a tight timetable, PR is sometimes the honest answer. But if every history lesson lives in PR, students stop learning to think historically. So the question becomes: what is the smallest change that moves this somewhere more useful?
Draft two: Interactive Amplify
The teacher keeps the slides. Same content, same images, same forty minutes. After slide two, she splits the class into pairs. Each pair gets a different short primary source on their iPad: an extract from the Domesday Book, a William of Poitiers passage, a contemporary chronicle entry. Their job, in pairs, is to highlight one piece of evidence that supports William's consolidation strategy and one piece that pushes back against it. They post the two extracts to a shared Padlet.
Slide six is now a class discussion of the Padlet wall. Slide seven is the multiple-choice form, kept as a quick check.
That lesson sits in Interactive Amplify. Students are interactive: they handle, they mark up, they explain. The technology amplifies what they could do without it. You cannot give thirty students thirty different sources on paper in forty minutes. You can on an iPad. The pedagogy has moved. Students are reasoning with evidence, not just receiving information.
The teacher added perhaps fifteen minutes of planning. The lesson is twice as ambitious.
Draft three: Creative Transform
The teacher rebuilds the lesson. The class spends the first ten minutes on the slide deck, just to anchor the context. Then, in groups of four, students take a position: William of Normandy, Hereward the Wake, the Pope's legate, an Anglo-Saxon thegn. Each group has ten minutes and an iPad to record a sixty-second piece-to-camera arguing their position on whether William's consolidation strategy was just. They watch each other's clips, vote, and write a one-sentence judgement using the evidence they heard.
That lesson sits in Creative Transform. Students are creating, not consuming. The technology transforms what the lesson can be. The recorded argument with evidence, watched by the class and judged, is not something a paper-based lesson can replicate in forty minutes. The pedagogy is different too. The teacher is no longer the source. She is now an editor, helping students sharpen what they want to say.
CT is rare. It takes longer to plan, longer to manage and goes wrong more often. For a lesson on how a foreign king kept his crown, where the historical interpretation matters, it is worth the cost. For a vocabulary recap on Tuesday afternoon, it is overkill.
The ten-minute version
You do not need three drafts. Here is the actual ten-minute workflow.
- Write the lesson the way you would normally write it. Three minutes.
- Ask: what are students doing with the technology? If reading or watching, you are in P. If clicking and responding, you are in I. If making, you are in C. One minute.
- Ask: what is the technology doing for the lesson? Same outcome as paper, you are in R. Better than paper, you are in A. Lesson would not exist without it, you are in T. One minute.
- Place the lesson on the grid. One minute.
- Decide if that is where you want it. If yes, ship the lesson. If no, change one thing (usually what students are doing) and re-place it. Four minutes.
Total: ten minutes. The output is a lesson you can defend, both to yourself in February when you are tired and to a colleague in a department meeting.
Place the lesson before you polish the lesson.
What to do tomorrow
Take a lesson you wrote last week. Place it on the grid. If you are surprised by where it lands, you have learned something useful about your default. If you want to nudge it, the smallest move usually works: change what students are doing with the technology, not the technology itself.
If you want a faster version, drop your draft into Review. It will classify the lesson for you, surface the strengths, flag the weaknesses, and suggest one practical next step. Or, if you would rather start fresh, open Generate: pick a subject and an age range, and Generate builds a full 3x3 matrix of nine activity ideas, one for each cell, with edtech tools and rationale for each. You decide which one to teach.
If you would rather work it out for yourself, Analyse walks you through a guided decision tree about your lesson and helps you place it on the grid yourself.
Want to see what other teachers have shipped in each cell first? Browse Interactive Amplify lesson examples across subjects and key stages, or jump to the full PICRAT examples catalogue.
Three tools, three different routes to the same answer. Ten minutes either way.
Andy Perryer is the global head of digital learning at a group of international schools and the creator of PICRAT Suite. The PICRAT framework was developed by Royce Kimmons, Charles Graham and Richard West in their 2020 paper in the CITE Journal.