Show students "The Twenty-Six Old Character," a 1942 video found on the Archives.org website. It is about the history of writing and writing instruments, up to "modern" fountain pens. This 20-minute video is a discussion starter for the topic of writing implement history. Follow this discussion with an active learning experience to encourage participation in research, reading, writing, discussion and reflection on writing implements. Show students how to evaluate online content for credible sources. Then have students evaluate sources regarding the history of writing implements. Arrange students into research groups to evaluate their collective list of resources about the history of the writing implement.
Group students again, and assign topics that fall within the history of writing. For example, have students visit the website Ringpen.com to view a timeline chronicling the history of writing tools. You can also use the topical categories found on the website "Not Published Yet" (see Resources) to assign writing implement research topics to the student groups.
Each group will write about a different topic or time period of the history of the pen. Some topics include: the first pen, quill, steel pens, fountain pens, the pencil, ball points and gel pens. Instruct students to write a collaborative blog about their topic or time period. Peers will review each others work and create a well-written piece describing the history of the writing implement. Students should produce a piece that is multimodal, including pictures, video and/or audio. The piece will be published online in a class blog or website.
Guide student groups to arrange their research of the history of the pen into either a topical or chronological project. Show students how to arrange their research into a cohesive project by arranging content on a whiteboard, tear sheets or applications such as Mind Node. The, lead the students in a whole class discussion to pull all the pieces of the history together into one chronologically correct project. Allow debate and collaborative work to create one online document that gives a complete history of the writing implement.
Assign students a reflective writing paper to help them further learn from the experience. The students will learn about the history of writing implements, but will retain the lesson longer than if it had been a lecture because they were learning actively. The result of this collaborative writing experience will be an understanding of how important the history of the writing implements is to our current use of software. There are terms and images that are used in computer software and online writing tools that reflect the history of the pen. For example, an interesting reflective and final project would be for students to find terms or images in computer tools that reflect back to the history of writing implements. Another reflective writing exercise is to help students to summarize how each change in writing instruments changed society. Help students to understand that computers, our latest writing implement, has changed current society.