Brenner, Barbara.  The Magic Box. Illustrated by Manuel Boix. Bantam Books, 1990. ISBN 0-553-05896-7.
The arrival of a magic box, which shows pictures, causes many changes to occur in an isolated little town removed from modern civilization and technology.
 

McPhail, David. Fix-It. Dutton, 1984. ISBN 0-525-44323-1.
An emergency develops when the television does not function. This book could lead to a discussion about the various ways household appliances have changed lives.
 

Hall, Donald. Ox-Cart Man. Illustrated by Barbara Cooney. Viking, 1979. ISBN 0-670-53328-9.
This book is set in early 19th-century New England and tells the story of a family exchanging products they made for store-bought goods.  The illustrations depict daily chores, travel, and seasonal change, and stimulate discussions about history, economics, and the process of change over time.

Discuss with children how technology has changed our world.
 

Invite a grandparent or a local senior citizen to come tell the class how life was different when they were young. Display old tools and pictures to show the children. Create a chart of changes on chart paper and/or use Inspiration/Kidspiration and project on TV.
 

Now the students are ready to create their own PowerPoint slide show about how our world has changed. Right-click on Our World Has Changed.ppt  and choose Save Target As. Then save to your grade level folder in Student Share, so your students can access it. Remember after saving, to navigate to the icon in Student Share, right click on the icon for Our World Has Changed, and select Properties. Then click on Read Only.
 

This slide show is intended to be used in Normal or Slide View, rather than Slide Show View, so that students can manipulate the pictures and type in the slide.
 

In the first few slides, the students will rearrange the pictures (click-n-drag) to show how we used to do things and how we can do them now. (You may want to point out that we still do some things the way we used to, but technology has given us other choices that we didn't have before.) Then the students will complete the sentences with their own words.
 

In the last slide, they will tell us what they have learned. (Click F5 to view the slide show.)
 

For those students who finish early, slide 9 is an opportunity to rearrange many pictures (click-n-drag) to show how we used to do things and how we can do them now. The students will put the pictures on the appropriate side of the line, either We used to ... or ... Now we ....   Delete this slide if you'd rather not use it with your students.
 

Slides 10 - 12 are for those students who would like to add their own pictures. With this Picture Gallery, they can copy a picture from one of these slides and paste it onto the slide where they'd like to use it, or they can insert clip art. Another option would be to have them insert an object, choose Bitmap Image, and they can draw their own pictures. These are advanced skills, of course. Delete these slides if you'd rather not offer that option to your students.