Most people who type PICRAT vs LoTi into a search bar are really asking which of the two they should be using. The honest answer is that they were built for different jobs. LoTi is a benchmarking instrument. PICRAT is a planning and observation tool. They overlap on the noun (technology integration) and they diverge on almost everything else. This piece walks through both with a single Year 9 history lesson placed on each, so the difference is concrete instead of abstract.
What LoTi actually is
The Levels of Teaching Innovation framework was developed by Christopher Moersch in 1994 and has been revised several times since. It is a seven-level scale that rates how technology is being used in a classroom or, more usefully, across a school or district. The levels run from 0 (Non-use) to 6 (Refinement). Each step represents a deeper integration of technology with student-led, inquiry-based learning.
The simplified ladder looks like this:
- Level 0. Non-use. No instructional use of technology.
- Level 1. Awareness. Technology is in the room but peripheral. Used for management or by the teacher only.
- Level 2. Exploration. Technology supplements the existing lesson. Drill and practice, demonstration, content delivery.
- Level 3. Infusion. Technology enriches teacher-directed lessons. Higher-order thinking is starting to appear, but the lesson is still framed by the teacher.
- Level 4. Integration. Technology is routinely used to engage students in higher-order thinking. The teacher steps back. Some versions split this into 4a (mechanical) and 4b (routine).
- Level 5. Expansion. Technology enables collaborative inquiry beyond the classroom. Students set the questions. Real-world problems, real audiences.
- Level 6. Refinement. Technology becomes invisible. It is fully integrated into authentic, student-driven inquiry.
LoTi has a serious claim to being the most rigorously validated of the technology integration models. Thirty years of iteration, a substantial quantitative research base behind it, and wide adoption in American school districts for measuring technology integration at scale. If you are a superintendent in California trying to understand how forty schools are doing on a single benchmark, LoTi will give you numbers other models can't.
Quick refresher on PICRAT
PICRAT was published by Royce Kimmons, Charles Graham and Richard West in the CITE Journal in 2020. It is a 3x3 grid built on two questions. What are the students doing with the technology (Passive, Interactive, Creative)? And what is the technology doing for the lesson (Replace, Amplify, Transform)? Combine the two and any lesson lands in one of nine cells. There is no top of the grid, no level to climb to. There is just a position, and an honest conversation about whether it is the right one for what the lesson is trying to do. The full guide is at What is PICRAT?.
One Year 9 history lesson
Causes of the English Civil War. The class has met the headline events already; today's job is to weigh which causes were most decisive. Students work in pairs. Each pair has an iPad and a curated set of eight short primary and secondary sources: a Charles I royal proclamation, an extract from the Grand Remonstrance, a Pym speech, a contemporary diary entry from each side, and three secondary summaries from a textbook supplier. The pair sorts the eight cards into a ranked list using a drag-and-drop digital tool. They then submit their top three causes with a one-sentence justification each to a shared class document. For the last ten minutes of the lesson, the teacher pulls the document up on the board and the class debates the top causes the room landed on, with pairs defending their picks against challenges from the floor.
That is the lesson. Same teacher, same class, same fifty minutes. Now let's place it on each model.
The lesson on LoTi
Level 0, 1 and 2 are out. The lesson is doing more than awareness or supplemental drill. Level 6 is also out: students aren't setting their own questions, the audience is internal, and there is no inquiry that goes beyond the classroom walls.
The honest landing zone is Level 3 (Infusion), brushing into the lower edge of Level 4 (Integration). The lesson uses technology to enrich a teacher-directed task. There is higher-order thinking happening (ranking, justifying, defending), but the question is set by the teacher, the source set is curated by the teacher, and the output goes nowhere outside the room. A LoTi-trained observer would write this up as Level 3 with a note that the discussion phase nudges into Level 4 territory.
The implication LoTi carries is the load-bearing part. To climb to Level 5, students would need to choose their own causes, source their own evidence, and present their conclusions to an authentic audience beyond the classroom. The lesson, as written, is a rung or two short of where LoTi would say a confident teacher should be aiming.
The lesson on PICRAT
What are students doing with the technology? They are sorting, ranking, justifying, posting and debating. That is firmly Interactive. They are not passive (this is not consumption), and they are not creative (they aren't producing new artefacts; they are weighing and arranging given ones).
What is the technology doing for the lesson? It is doing things you couldn't do on paper in fifty minutes. Eight curated sources per pair, accessed instantly. Thirty pairs ranking simultaneously. A live shared document that becomes the spine of the closing debate. That is Amplify: the same pedagogical move as a paper-based card-sort, but at a scale and pace paper cannot match.
The cell is Interactive Amplify (IA). PICRAT places the lesson; it does not rate it. The placement carries an implicit verdict: the teacher made a deliberate move out of Passive Replace, the technology is earning its keep, and the cell is appropriate for the lesson's intent (weigh causes, defend choices). PICRAT does not tell the teacher to climb to Creative Transform. CT would mean rewriting the lesson so that students produce something new, perhaps a documentary clip arguing a particular cause was decisive. That is a valid lesson, but it is also a different lesson, with different objectives, taking different time. PICRAT is content for the IA lesson to be IA when IA is the right answer.
LoTi: Level 3, brushing 4
PICRAT: Interactive Amplify
The fundamental difference
LoTi is a ladder. PICRAT is a map. The shape of the model is the argument it makes about teaching.
A ladder implies a destination. The teacher whose lesson sits at Level 3 has unfinished business; she should be aiming at 4, then 5, then 6. The verbs LoTi uses (innovation, integration, refinement) all point upward. The model is doing useful work when you want to nudge a profession toward a particular vision of what good practice looks like, which is exactly what you want at district scale.
A map has no destination. The teacher whose lesson sits in Interactive Amplify is somewhere on the map. The question is not whether IA is higher than IR; it is whether IA is the right cell for what this lesson is trying to do. PICRAT is doing useful work when you want to give individual teachers a vocabulary for placement and a prompt for honest conversation, which is exactly what you want in a planning meeting on Tuesday evening.
A ladder asks you to climb. A map asks you to be deliberate.
The two models also differ on what they bake in. LoTi has constructivist, inquiry-based pedagogy as its top end. The implication is that constructivist teaching is, in general, the goal. PICRAT is pedagogically agnostic. The Creative Transform cell is not a moral high point; it is one of nine valid places a lesson might sit, and CT lessons are often the wrong choice for a recap, a knowledge transfer, or anything where the teacher's expert framing is the point.
When each one earns its keep
LoTi earns its keep when you need a single number for a system. A district benchmarking 40 schools, a researcher quantifying technology adoption across a cohort, or a director of digital learning trying to track movement over three years all benefit from the rigour of a validated scale. The same property that makes it a poor planning tool (a single ordinal axis) makes it a strong measurement instrument.
PICRAT earns its keep when you need a vocabulary for individual decisions. A teacher placing a draft lesson, a head of department debriefing an observation, a coach asking a colleague why this lesson and not another all benefit from a model that splits the activity question from the technology question and refuses to declare a winner.
The two models can stack. A district can use LoTi for its annual technology integration audit, and the same district can train its teachers in PICRAT for everyday planning. The sentence to remember is that LoTi answers how innovative is the practice across our system and PICRAT answers where does this specific lesson live and is that where I want it. Different questions, different tools.
What to do tomorrow
If you are a head of digital learning currently using LoTi, you do not need to abandon it. You probably need to add PICRAT to your planning and observation conversations, while keeping LoTi for your annual benchmark. If you are a teacher being asked to climb a LoTi ladder, give yourself permission to ask whether the lesson on your desk needs to be at Level 5, or whether Interactive Amplify is the right place for it to live this Tuesday.
If you want to see the broader landscape, Compare technology integration models places PICRAT alongside SAMR, TPACK, RAT, TIM and LoTi side by side, with a one-line verdict on each. PICRAT vs SAMR takes the comparison most teachers actually need into more depth. The full plain-English explanation of the framework lives at The PICRAT model.
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. The Levels of Teaching Innovation scale was developed by Christopher Moersch in 1994 and has been revised several times since.