Bring in hand-sewing materials for three students (including needles, thread, and cloth to sew). Also bring in a sewing machine with thread and cloth. Have three students (whom you may have talked to earlier) sew the cloth by hand. You, or another student, will sew other cloth with the machine at the same time. This demonstrates the speed of modern manufacturing.
Tell your students that the class is going to try something different. For the next 24 hours (or, even better, 48 hours or more), students are to refrain from calling, texting, or using any electronic communication in any form (including telephone landlines). They can use their computers, but not for email, chat, Facebook, or any similar activity. If they want to communicate, they must do so face to face or through paper letters or notes. This will likely cause some students a level of distress. You may want to give them a day or two to prepare, allowing them to let others know that they will be unavailable through electronic communication.
As a class, prepare a trip to a distant city that is accessible by land from your location. Research the distance between your town or city and the other city. Break the class into five groups. Have Group 1 figure out how long it would take to reach the city on a modern airline (600 mph). Group 2 will figure the time in an automobile (average of 65 mph). Group 3 will do the same for an early steam engine train (40 mph). Group 4 will do the same, but by horseback (average about 5 mph). Group 5 gets the honor of being the slowest group because they will have to figure how long it takes to get to that city by foot (at about 3 mph).
Most pre-industrial food came from local sources, but that changed. Choose a common food item like a candy bar. Look at the list of ingredients. Using the Internet, have the class try to determine the possible source of those ingredients. So, in a Snickers bar, the chocolate may have come from Cote d'Ivoire in Africa and the soybean oil from Iowa or Brazil. This shows how interconnected the world has become since the Industrial Revolution.