A framework lives or dies by its examples. Most teachers can recite the PICRAT definitions after one read. The harder skill is recognising each cell on sight, in a colleague's lesson, in a department audit, in a deep dive. That comes from carrying around a small mental library of canonical examples. This is that library.
One real lesson per cell of the grid, or the matrix, depending on which name your school has settled on. Nine subjects, from Grade 3 to Grade 11 (Years 4 to 12). The point is to give you one anchor in each cell so you can recognise the rest by family resemblance.
One page with all nine cells and a classroom example in each. Free to use, share and print with a link to picrat.com (CC BY 4.0).
Nine examples follow, one row at a time, starting with the Passive row. For each one I have given the placement reasoning, the watch-out and, where it helps, the nearest neighbouring cell. Each placement describes what students do with the technology.
The Passive row
Grade 8 Spanish (Year 9): a Madrid teenager's vlog
The class is working on free time and the past tense. The teacher has chosen a five-minute vlog from a channel for Spanish learners, in which a teenager in Madrid talks about her weekend. She plays it on the board from YouTube, once for the gist and once more with pauses on useful phrases such as fui al cine. Students listen and note the phrases in their books.
This is PR. Students are watching and listening. Nobody is asked to respond to anything. The vlog is doing the job the textbook's listening track did last year, played twice by the teacher.
Watch out: PR is the honest answer when the job is to get the language into the room before students use it. The thing to notice is a term where every Spanish lesson sits here. It has two near neighbours. Give students the vlog on their own iPads with captions on and the freedom to replay, and the technology is adding something: that is PA. Set eight questions about what she said on a Google Form, and students are answering, which is Interactive.
Grade 7 Science (Year 8): a live microscope view of a leaf's stomata
Before the class make their own leaf peels, the teacher shows them what to look for. A school tablet on a clamp stand sits over the eyepiece of the demonstration microscope, and its camera view is mirrored to the board. For fifteen minutes the class watches as she moves across a peel from the underside of a privet leaf, stops on a pair of guard cells around an open stoma, and focuses up and down. Students sketch what they see in their books.
This is PA. Students are watching the teacher's view, so the student role is Passive. The demonstration is the one she would give anyway. Last year students came up in turns for a few seconds each at the eyepiece. The camera adds a shared live view: the whole class sees the same stoma at the same moment while she points to the guard cells and talks them through.
Watch out: the view is microscopic, which can look like PT. The microscope made stomata visible long before the camera was added, so the camera adds to the demonstration and the lesson could still run without it. Ask who is driving. If students photograph their own peels on tablets and count the stomata, the lesson sits in the Interactive row.
Grade 6 Geography (Year 7): a VR rainforest tour
The unit is on biomes. Students put on cardboard VR headsets with a class set of phones loaded with a curated 360-degree video of the Amazon canopy. They watch three short scenes, the forest floor, the understorey and the canopy, with the teacher's commentary between each. The tour takes fifteen minutes. In the last five, students jot two sentences on what they noticed.
This is PT. Students are watching the experience without controlling its pace or path, so the activity stays Passive. The technology transforms what the lesson can show: no diagram and no clip on the classroom screen gives the height of the canopy the way standing inside it does. The transformation is in what is being delivered.
Watch out: the wow of VR can be confused with learning. Most teachers will want a task afterwards that asks students to do something with what they saw. Place that task separately. Labelling a printed diagram happens away from the technology, so the cell stays PT. Have students label the layers on their iPads and that part of the lesson is Interactive.
The Interactive row
Grade 3 Maths (Year 4): a times-tables recap on Mentimeter
Last lesson the class practised the seven times table. Today's starter is a Mentimeter quiz on the board. Each student opens the link on their iPad. Five questions, multiple choice, students tap an answer. The class watches the bar chart fill in real time.
This is IR. Students are answering questions, which is Interactive. The quiz is the one the teacher would run anyway, and Mentimeter is doing the job mini-whiteboards did last term: she sees who has which answer and carries on with the lesson.
Watch out: IR can be mistaken for IA because the chart looks lively. Ask what the technology adds to the task. Here, nothing yet. If the teacher stops at question three because the chart shows half the class chose the same wrong answer for seven times eight, and reteaches it there and then, the technology is adding something and the lesson sits at IA.
Grade 8 History (Year 9): paired source-tagging on Padlet
The unit is the Norman Conquest. Each pair of students receives one of thirty different short primary sources on their iPad: an extract from the Domesday Book, a William of Poitiers passage, a chronicle entry. Their job, in pairs, is to highlight one piece of evidence supporting William's consolidation strategy and one piece that complicates it. They post both to a shared Padlet wall, and the class discusses the patterns in the last fifteen minutes.
This is the workhorse cell. Students are working with evidence and responding to it, which is Interactive. The task is one a history teacher would set anyway. Padlet adds something to it: every pair's evidence sits side by side on one wall, so the discussion starts from thirty sources in place of one.
Watch out: IA and PR are one decision apart. Hand out the sources and have students post, and it is IA. Walk through one source on the board yourself, and it is PR. Check by where the talking happens.
Grade 9 Health (Year 10): testing a chatbot's sun-safety advice
The class is learning to judge health information, and many of them already ask chatbots for advice. In pairs, on the school's approved AI chatbot, they work through a sheet of sun-safety questions and ask each one three ways: neutrally, with a leading assumption ("Why is a base tan good protection?"), and as a worried teenager wanting reassurance. They record how the answer shifts, then check each answer against official health guidance. The lesson ends with the class agreeing a short checklist for when chatbot advice needs checking.
This is IT. Students are questioning, comparing and checking, which is Interactive. They are not making a product. The technology transforms what the lesson can be: the thing being studied is how an AI's advice changes with the wording of the question, and that cannot be set without the technology answering them.
Watch out: IT depends on the technology responding. If the teacher prints one chatbot answer in advance for students to rate, nothing answers their wording and the lesson no longer needs the technology. Keep personal details out of the questions.
The Creative row
Grade 10 English (Year 11): a typed analytical essay
Students have read Of Mice and Men. Today's lesson is a 600-word essay on whether George had a choice. They write in Google Docs on their school iPads. The teacher circulates and talks to students at their desks. At the end of the lesson, students export to PDF and submit through the LMS.
This is CR. Students are creating, in the sense of producing original text and argument. The essay is the one the teacher would set anyway, and Google Docs is doing the job the exercise book did. Spell-check and digital submission are conveniences. The lesson itself is unchanged.
Watch out: CR is often misclassified as CA because the technology feels modern. Modern technology does not amplify a lesson by itself. Ask what it adds to the task. If the teacher were leaving live comments in each document and students were redrafting from them before the bell, that round of feedback would be the addition and the lesson would sit at CA. CR is the right cell when the writing itself is the work.
Grade 5 Music (Year 6): a soundtrack for a silent storm clip
The teacher gives the class a silent 30-second clip of a storm building and breaking. Over two lessons each child composes a 30-second track in GarageBand, using its instruments and percussion they record themselves, to build from light rain to a thunder crash and back. They add the track to the clip, play the two together, and go back to move any section that misses its moment.
This is CA. Children are composing their own score, so the work is Creative. The task is one a music teacher would set anyway: play a live soundtrack on classroom instruments while the clip runs. Recording adds something to it. Children can play music and picture back together, hear exactly where a section misses its moment, and fix it.
Watch out: putting the music on a video does not make it CT. Silent films were scored live, and this is that task with playback added. Mark the composing: the build, the crash, the fall. The production values are incidental.
Grade 11 Art (Year 12): a textile print generated from 190 years of rainfall
The class has looked at artists who turn data into pattern. Each student downloads the monthly rainfall record for their region, more than 2,200 months going back to 1836, and works out how far each month sits from the long-term average. They adapt a short starter program so that every month becomes a mark, and they write the rules themselves: one student turns each year into a row of twelve tiles running from blue to ochre, another draws wetter months as longer, heavier threads. They run it, rewrite the rules as patterns appear, and print the result on fabric. The work takes five lessons.
This is CT. Each student decides how the data becomes marks and makes the final print, so it is an original artwork. It could not be made without the technology: more than 2,200 readings drive the design, and the patterns students find in the record shape the rules they write.
Watch out: CT is rare on purpose. It costs more in planning and in lesson time, and it goes wrong more often. It is worth the cost when the idea needs it. If students hand-colour a few dozen readings into stripes, the full record no longer drives the design and the work sits at CA. PICRAT is a placement tool. The grid does not climb.
How to use this library
Three uses, in order of frequency.
The first is recognition. Scan a colleague's lesson and try to match it to one of the nine examples. The match is rarely exact, but the family resemblance gives you the cell in five seconds. That is what carrying canonical examples around does for the planning conversation.
The second is planning. Take a lesson you are about to write. Pick the cell you want it to live in, find the example for that cell, and use it as the silhouette. The lesson will be its own version. The activity shape and the technology role will land in the right zip code.
The third is auditing. Take the last six lessons in a unit. Place each one against the nine examples. Where they cluster is your default. If you want a different balance, changing one or two lessons is usually enough: a PR recap becomes an IA source task. A wholesale reshuffle is rarely the right call.
A typical department audit looks something like this. The figures are illustrative. PR and IA between them carry the bulk of the placements; the Transform column is rare. Knowing the shape of the distribution helps a department recognise its own pattern when an audit lands.
Recognise the cell first. Plan the lesson second.
If you want a faster start, drop a lesson plan into Analyse. It walks you through a guided decision tree about your lesson and helps you place it on the grid. The output is the same kind of placement these nine examples illustrate, generated against your own lesson.
If you want to start fresh, open Generate. Pick a subject and an age range. You get a 3x3 of nine activity ideas with their PICRAT placements, structured exactly the way this library is. Treat the output as a planning brief. The placements are starting points.
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.