Trying something different in the teenage class

I had a feeling that my group of 17 teenagers, who are supposed to be preparing for PET, were getting a little bored and restless, and I wanted to jazz it up a bit. The unit theme was education, so I found/developed four texts about Japan, The Netherlands, New Zealand and The USA, and their different educational systems. I used photos of pre-school kids, primary, secondary and university students, to elicit the different stages of education and ages. In a small bag I had cut up the names of the countries (5xUSA, 4xNZ, etc etc), to sort them into groups (so they weren't working with the same people). This worked well, and they were soon in their groups according to which country they pulled out.
I then said "Tell each other about what you know or imagine about the ed.sys in that country. - 2 minutes".
Then I gave them each the text about their particular country, but all chopped and jumbled. It didn't take long for them to put it back together. They then had to fill in a chart in their groups. I wanted to get them writing questions about their text, but was running out of time. (I had my CELTYL tutor's voice in my head - what's the CRUX of your lesson, Jo? What's the crux?') - admittedly, it was probably the question writing.
I put the whole texts up around the room, and asked them to choose another country which interested them, and go take notes, to report back to their group. They seemed to be very interested in this. They then reported back, and finished filling in the table.
To wrap up, I asked a few of them what they had found most interesting or unusual about the ed.sys in the other countries - and writing homework was, of course, writing a similar text about the ed.sys in Italy.
Overall it was a fun lesson, which got them working with different people, and speaking more. It needs tweaking (the whole filling-in of the table didn't seem to serve much purpose really), and something else to make it more motivating, but as a first step away from the book, I felt quite happy with it.
I am going to try asking for feedback about it from them next week. Their class teacher would also like to observe a lesson soon, so I'd better keep creating that material!