Ask any teacher what their students are doing and you get an answer in two seconds. Reading. Talking. Building. The harder question is what they are doing with the technology in front of them. PICRAT puts that on a single axis with three roles: Passive, Interactive and Creative. Place the lesson on that axis correctly and the rest of the framework slots in.
Here is a 60-second test. Three classroom scenarios, all using an iPad, all in real schools last term. Read each one. Decide which point on the axis it sits on. Then check the answer.
Scenario 1
The class is learning about volcanoes. Each child has an iPad. The teacher pushes a 90-second BBC clip on Vesuvius to every screen at the same time. After it finishes, the teacher cold-calls four children to share what they noticed. Two minutes of class talk. Lesson moves on.
Answer: Passive
The students watched. The students listened. Four of them answered when called on, but that talk happened away from the iPad. With the technology, all anyone did was watch. None of that needed an iPad: it could have been a TV at the front and a paper handout, and the lesson would teach the same thing. The iPad on each desk is the only thing that looks new, and that is the giveaway. PICRAT calls this Passive Replace, and a lot of the lessons I see land here. PR is not always wrong. For a recap before half-term, it is often the honest answer. The risk is when PR becomes the default rather than the choice.
Scenario 2
Students work in pairs. On the iPad, they drag and drop twelve labels onto a digital diagram of the heart. Wrong labels turn red and bounce back. Right labels click into place. Each pair has to get all twelve correct before a short stretch on blood flow direction unlocks. The teacher walks the room, listening for the conversations that happen when a label keeps bouncing.
Answer: Interactive
The students are not just receiving information. They are answering, getting feedback, and adjusting. Labelling the diagram on the iPad is what makes this Interactive: the students are responding through the technology. The immediate red bounce on a wrong label is the technology adding instant feedback, which is a question for the other axis. Notice that the talk is happening too. In my experience, this is often the first deliberate change a teacher makes to a lesson.
Scenario 3
Groups of three have ten minutes. Their task: film a thirty-second scene that reveals a character's hidden motive without dialogue. They block it, shoot it on the iPad, edit it in iMovie, upload it to a class channel. Then the next group has to write down the motive they saw. The clips go up on the board for the last ten minutes of the lesson, with the guesses next to them.
Answer: Creative
The students are making, not consuming. The clip did not exist before they made it, and another group has to read it. The technology is now an instrument, not a textbook. The judgement at the end is the lesson; the iPad just made the judgement possible. Creative does not mean it has to be art. A coded simulation, a recorded argument with evidence or a designed experiment all sit here too.
The 60-second test
You do not need three drafts to classify a lesson. You need to ask one question.
What are the students doing with the technology?
If they are reading, watching or listening, they are in P. If they are clicking, dragging, sorting, voting or responding to feedback, they are in I. If they are making something that did not exist before the lesson, they are in C.
That is the test. Sixty seconds, no notes. The Replace, Amplify and Transform axis is a separate question about what the technology is doing for the lesson; it lives in the same model and you can read it on What is PICRAT. For now, the activity axis on its own is enough to start choosing on purpose.
What to do tomorrow
Pick the lesson you are teaching second period tomorrow. Decide what your students will be doing with the technology in it. If you cannot honestly answer with anything other than reading or watching, you are in P. That is allowed. It should be a deliberate call, not the only call you ever make.
If you want to test it on something more substantial, drop the draft into Analyse. It walks you through a guided decision tree about your lesson and helps you place it on the grid yourself. The answer sometimes surprises people. That surprise is the point.
Andy Perryer is Director of Education Innovation 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.