Figuring out the best way to bring video into the classroom can be tough .There’s YouTube EDU, TED Talks, TeacherTube, and a slew of other video sites.But none are dedicated to helping bring first-person stories into the history classroom. That’s where IWitness comes in . It’s a free educational website / web tool developed by the USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education. IWitness brings the human stories of the Institute’s Visual History Archive to secondary school teachers and their students via engaging multimedia-learning activities. Designed to be participatory, academic and student-driven, IWitness addresses education standards from the Common Core State Standards Initiative (United States) and the International Society for Technology in Education, among others.
Get First-Person Perspectives
IWitness provides access to nearly 1,300 full life histories, testimonies of survivors and other witnesses to the Holocaust and other genocides for guided exploration. Students can watch testimonies and use them in individual or group multimedia projects; teachers can assign activities as classwork or homework, and can even custom-build their own lessons and activities. The testimonies are searchable by more than 9,000 keywords, enabling students to pinpoint exact moments of interest within each testimony, which averages two hours in length.
The IWitness video editor gives students the freedom to integrate testimony clips together with footage from other sources as well as photos and maps, voiceover audio, music, and text. In a way that transcends traditional print materials, the interactive, audio-visual form of IWitness connects learners with contextualized first-person views of history while training them to master the digital and media literacies necessary for the future.
Being Tested Around The World
IWitness is highly scalable and can be adapted for a broad array of learning environments and cultural needs. The web site, currently in beta, is being tested in classrooms in the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Rwanda, and Australia. To date IWitness has been accessed by over 6,000 high school students and nearly 2,200 educators in 36 countries and all 50 U.S. states. The American Association of School Librarians recognized IWitness as one of the “Best Websites for Teaching and Learning” in 2012.
By integrating testimony-based education with the development of digital literacy and other 21st-century competencies, IWitness encourages critical thinking and self-reflection, and helps students get a sense of their own place in history and of the profound impact their words and actions can have on the lives of others.
The IWitness Video Challenge
Earlier this year, USC Shoah Foundation founder Steven Spielberg announced the IWitness Video Challenge, a contest that challenges secondary school students to honor the legacy of Schindler’s List by engaging in community service inspired by survivors’ testimonies and showcasing their action in an IWitness video essay. Students will be guided in their community service projects by the testimonies they watch in IWitness. As part of the IWitness Video Challenge activity, students are asked to create a one-to four-minute video essay with an easy-to-use video-editing tool on the IWitness website, allowing them to link their voices to those in the archive who inspired them to act.
Teachers interested in signing up their students in the IWitness Video Challenge can do so on the website and submit video essays by October 31, 2013. USC Shoah Foundation will fly the IWitness Video Challenge winning student, a guardian/parent and teacher to Los Angeles in March 2014 to screen the video essay as part of the Institute’s 20th anniversary activities.
For more information about the IWitness Video Challenge, visithttp://iwitness.usc.edu/SFI/IWitnessChallenge/ .
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