The question I get asked most often after running staff training on PICRAT is whether it replaces TPACK. The honest answer is that it doesn't, and it shouldn't, because the two frameworks are not really answering the same question.
This piece is an attempt to explain what each of them is for, in a way that stops people picking one over the other when they should be using both. I'll keep the theory short and the practical bit long.
What TPACK is actually for
TPACK was published in 2006 by Punya Mishra and Matthew Koehler. It's a Venn diagram with three circles: Technological Knowledge, Pedagogical Knowledge, and Content Knowledge. Where the circles overlap you get four more regions, ending in the central sweet spot where all three meet, which they named Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge.
I've watched many teachers look at this diagram and visibly shrink. Seven named regions is a lot to hold in your head. So I'll give you the shortcut I use in workshops.
TPACK is a model of teacher expertise. It's a way of describing what a teacher needs to know in order to teach a particular topic with a particular technology to a particular class. It answers a single question:
What does this teacher need to know to do this well?
If you're running a PGCE programme, TPACK is gold. It tells you that knowing the subject (Content) isn't enough, knowing how to teach it (Pedagogy) isn't enough, and knowing how to use the software (Technology) isn't enough. You need all three, and you need the overlaps: a teacher who knows how this particular tool changes how this particular topic can be taught.
That is a real and useful insight. It reshaped teacher training for a reason.
What PICRAT is actually for
PICRAT came out in 2020, fourteen years later, and it answers a different question altogether.
It's not a model of teacher knowledge. It's a model of classroom activity. A three-by-three grid with two axes: what the students are doing with the technology (Passive, Interactive, Creative), and what the technology is doing to the task compared to a non-tech version (Replace, Amplify, Transform).
PICRAT answers the question:
What is actually happening in this lesson?
It's an observational tool, not a knowledge map. You can use it after the bell has gone to describe the lesson you just taught. You can use it before the lesson to plan where you want it to sit. You can use it to coach another teacher by watching their lesson and dropping it on the grid.
You cannot, really, use TPACK that way. TPACK tells you whether the teacher is ready. PICRAT tells you what the lesson looked like.
A useful image: TPACK is the library you visit over the summer holiday to prepare for the year. PICRAT is the lens you put on before the bell goes on Monday morning. Both matter. They do different jobs, at different speeds, on different days.
Two questions, not one
The moment you see it this way, the argument about which model is "better" gets clearer. TPACK and PICRAT are not fighting for the same ground. TPACK is academic research about what it takes to teach well with technology. PICRAT is a practical tool for deciding what to do on Wednesday.
And if the question you're asking is the practical one, which is the question almost every teacher is actually asking, PICRAT is the answer.
A worked example: planning a Year 4 maths unit on data handling
Let me make this concrete. You're a Year 4 teacher. Next half term you've got a unit on bar charts, pictograms and simple data handling. You want to make proper use of technology. Where do the two models help?
Monday, the planning stage. TPACK does the work.
You sit down with the unit plan and TPACK is actually useful for the first time in your life. You already have the Content Knowledge: you know what a bar chart is. You already have the Pedagogical Knowledge: you know that nine-year-olds learn data handling better when they collect their own data first. The missing piece is the Technological Knowledge bit. Do you know Microsoft Forms well enough to build a data collection form they can all fill in? Do you know Excel well enough to get a class dataset into a pivot chart? Are you confident enough with the iPads to let each child make their own bar chart in Numbers?
This is TPACK doing the job it was designed for. It helps you work out where the gap in your own expertise is and what you need to learn before you can teach the unit. You decide you're confident with Forms but your Excel is shaky, so you book thirty minutes with the digital learning lead. Done.
Wednesday, in the lesson. PICRAT does the work.
Now the unit is running. You've built the Microsoft Form, the children have collected data on favourite breakfast cereals during the morning, and after lunch they're going to use Numbers on the iPads to make their own bar charts of the class data.
TPACK has gone quiet. It doesn't have much to say about the lesson itself. It served its purpose last week.
PICRAT now has plenty to say. Before the lesson, you decide where you want it to sit: Creative-Amplify. The children are making something (Creative), and the iPads are making the chart-drawing quicker and more accurate (Amplify) but not fundamentally transforming the task, because they could in principle have drawn the bar charts on squared paper.
After the lesson, you look at what actually happened. Half the class finished early and started customising the colours of their bars instead of interpreting them. Two children found an "insert formula" button and worked out the mean. You reclassify on the spot: the strongest pupils moved into Creative-Transform without you intending them to, because the technology let them ask questions the paper version wouldn't have allowed. The middle of the class sat firmly in Creative-Amplify as you'd planned. A handful were still in Interactive-Replace because they were essentially copying the bar chart from someone else's screen.
That's useful information. TPACK couldn't have given you any of it. PICRAT does it in two minutes.
Friday, reflecting. Both again.
At the end of the week the two models rejoin. PICRAT told you that your middle group stayed in Amplify when you'd quietly hoped they'd reach Transform. Why? Go back to TPACK. Was it a Technology gap (the children didn't know Numbers well enough)? A Pedagogy gap (you didn't scaffold the "what could this tool do that paper can't?" question)? Or a Content gap (the data you collected wasn't rich enough to need a tool)? The diagnostic power is in pairing them.
Why teachers have always found TPACK harder to use
I want to be careful here. TPACK isn't flawed. It's just pitched at a different altitude from the one most classroom teachers need.
If you're a university researcher, a teacher trainer, or someone running a postgraduate module, TPACK gives you a taxonomy that lets you describe gaps in teacher preparation with precision. That's valuable work.
If you're a Year 4 teacher at 8:10 in the morning with a mug of instant coffee and fifteen minutes before the children arrive, a seven-region Venn diagram is not what you need. You need a framework you can glance at and use. That's PICRAT.
So the actual problem isn't that TPACK is wrong. It's that it got pulled out of its natural habitat (teacher education research) and dropped into staff meetings where teachers were asked to apply it to tomorrow's lesson. It doesn't work at that altitude, and watching it fail to work didn't help anybody's opinion of educational theory.
What TPACK is still useful for
I want to be fair to TPACK, because it is doing real work in the right setting. TPACK gives teacher educators a useful taxonomy for describing gaps in teacher preparation. The research literature on TPACK is serious and worth reading. None of that is in dispute.
What TPACK can't do, and was never designed to do, is help a classroom teacher look at the lesson they just taught and decide what to change next. The Venn diagram is the wrong shape for that job. The labels describe knowledge the teacher needs to have acquired, not behaviour the lesson needs to produce. A teacher who has mastered all seven regions of TPACK can still walk out of a classroom not knowing whether the lesson worked, because TPACK isn't the lens for that question.
If you've been trying to use TPACK as a classroom tool and feeling like it isn't clicking, you're not imagining it. The model wasn't built for that job. It doesn't mean TPACK is wrong; it means you're using the wrong tool for the work in front of you.
The short answer
TPACK is a framework for thinking about teacher expertise. It belongs in initial training programmes, CPD research, and the academic literature on digital pedagogy. That's a perfectly reasonable home for it, and it does good work there.
PICRAT is the framework for the actual job of running a classroom. If you want a model you can use to plan a lesson, observe a colleague, coach a teacher, or reflect on your own practice this afternoon, PICRAT is the one that fits on a Post-it and works on a Tuesday. That's why I've built my professional life around it.
If you want to try PICRAT on a real lesson, Analyse will classify it in about two minutes. If you want to plan a new lesson that lands in a specific cell, Generate works the other way round. Both are free.
Andy Perryer is a global leader of digital learning and the creator of PICRAT Suite. TPACK was developed by Punya Mishra and Matthew Koehler in their 2006 paper in Teachers College Record. PICRAT was developed by Royce Kimmons, Charles Graham and Richard West in their 2020 paper in the CITE Journal.