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. Different subjects, different year groups, different schools. The point is to give you one anchor in each cell so you can recognise the rest by family resemblance.
Nine examples follow, in reading order: bottom row first because that is where most lessons live, then middle, then top. For each one I have given the placement reasoning, the watch-out, and the smallest move that would shift it.
The Passive row
Year 8 History: a slide-deck recap of the feudal system
The teacher has thirty minutes. The class needs to revisit the feudal pyramid before next lesson's source work. She opens a five-slide deck on the board. Each slide has one image and three lines of text. Students follow on their iPads, then answer four multiple-choice questions on a Google Form.
This is PR. Students are reading and selecting from given options. The technology is doing what a textbook and a paper exit ticket would have done. Nothing about the iPad has changed what the lesson asks of the students.
Watch out: PR is the honest answer for a recap before a higher-stakes lesson. The risk is when every history lesson lives at PR. The smallest move out is usually IA: replace the form with a paired source-tagging task on Padlet.
Year 6 Maths: an adaptive quiz on Eedi
Twenty minutes of the lesson are set aside for arithmetic fluency. Students log into Eedi. The platform asks each student questions calibrated to their last session's performance. A wrong answer surfaces a short worked example before re-asking. The teacher monitors a live class dashboard and pulls one group out for direct teaching while the rest work.
This is PA. Students are still consuming questions and producing answers, which is the Passive end of the activity axis for fluency drills. The technology amplifies what the lesson can do: a paper worksheet cannot adapt to each child's last answer or surface the right intervention. The teacher's focus also amplifies because the dashboard tells her where to spend her time.
Watch out: PA is comfortable and can become the default for the whole arithmetic block. Adaptive practice works best in 15 to 20 minute pulses. Live teaching does the rest. Schedule the platform deliberately.
Year 7 Geography: 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 and listen for six minutes, then spend twenty minutes labelling layers of the rainforest on a printed diagram and writing 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 paper diagram and no classroom video pasted on a screen replicates the height and immersion of a 360-degree canopy. The transformation is in what is being delivered.
Watch out: the wow of VR can be confused with learning. Pair every PT lesson with a follow-up activity that asks students to do something with what they saw. Without that, PT becomes a six-minute novelty that crowds out the rest of the lesson.
The Interactive row
Year 4 spelling: a Mentimeter recap
Last lesson the class learned the week's seven new spellings. 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 interacting with the technology, tapping answers and seeing collective results. The technology is replacing what mini-whiteboards and a show of hands would have done. It is faster, more engaging, and gives the teacher better data than a forest of waving boards.
Watch out: IR can be mistaken for IA because students are clicking. The clicking by itself is incidental. The test is whether the activity could be done on paper at roughly the same quality. If yes, it is IR; if the technology adds something paper cannot, it is IA.
Year 9 History: 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, and IA is what most departments are quietly aiming for. Students are reasoning interactively with evidence. The technology amplifies what the lesson can do: thirty students cannot share thirty different sources on paper in forty minutes. The pedagogy has moved beyond what the medium would have allowed.
Watch out: IA can drift back to PR if the teacher does the close-reading at the front. The shift up is small (sources distributed, students post) and the shift back is small (teacher walks through one source on the board). Audit by where the talking happens.
Year 11 Chemistry: a cross-class simulation of reaction kinetics
Three Year 11 chemistry classes in three different schools log into a shared simulation of a second-order reaction. Each class controls one variable (concentration, temperature, surface area). Students watch how the others' changes alter the global graph in real time. After twelve minutes the teachers regroup their classes for a fifteen-minute discussion of what the data showed about rate-determining steps.
This is IT. Students are interactive, manipulating variables and arguing with the data. The technology transforms what the lesson can be: a single classroom cannot run three independent variable conditions in parallel and compare results across schools. The shared simulation is the lesson.
Watch out: IT lessons are logistically expensive. They are worth the cost when the cross-class data is the point. They are overkill when the same lesson would work as IA inside one classroom.
The Creative row
Year 10 English: 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 gives live feedback in the comments. 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 technology is replacing pen and paper. Spell-check, comment threads, 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. The honest read is that this lesson would teach roughly the same thing on paper. CR is fine for an essay; it is the right cell when the writing itself is the work.
Year 7 Geography: a stop-motion volcano animation
Students working in groups of three build a tectonic-plate setup on their desks with paper labels and small objects. They use Stop Motion Studio on an iPad to record a 30-second animation showing how a composite volcano forms over time. They add narration on the second take. The class watches the best three at the end and votes on which one most clearly shows the process.
This is CA. Students are creating an artefact, and the technology amplifies what they can produce: stop-motion compresses a tectonic process into half a minute in a way no paper diagram can. The pedagogy is anchored in the modelling and the narration, both of which are sharper because the artefact has to be watchable.
Watch out: CA can become a craft lesson with no geography. The fix is in the brief. Mark the artefact against the science criteria. The production values are incidental.
Year 9 History: a podcast on the Norman Conquest
Returning to the Norman Conquest unit. The anchor lesson asks students, in groups of four, to record a six-minute podcast arguing whether William's consolidation strategy was just. Each group is assigned a position (William of Normandy, Hereward the Wake, the Pope's legate, an Anglo-Saxon thegn) and given access to the source pack from earlier IA work. The lesson uses two periods. The podcasts are published to a class hub and the class votes on which made the strongest case from the evidence.
This is CT. Students are creating a public-facing artefact with structure, evidence and argument. The technology transforms what the lesson can produce: the recorded judgement, watched and judged by the class, sits outside what a paper-based unit can produce in the time available. The pedagogy moves too. The teacher's role shifts to editor. She helps students sharpen what they want to say.
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 historical interpretation matters. It is overkill for a vocabulary recap. 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. The smallest move is usually one or two lessons up the activity axis, from PR to IA. A wholesale reshuffle is rarely the right call.
The honest distribution from a typical department audit looks like this. PR and IA between them carry the bulk of the placements; the corners are 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 the 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.