Are you an educator? What question would you like to see incorporated into an IWitness activity? Share your voice.

In July 2012, the USC Shoah Foundation Institute convened the inaugural workshop of “Teaching with Testimony for the 21st Century,” a professional development program for teachers in Europe centered on the educational use of Holocaust eyewitness testimony.

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND—Echoes and Reflections, a groundbreaking multimedia curriculum on the Holocaust, has been honored for its use of visual history testimony and its

The students came to the Institute to search for and extract 10 video clips to use for a project in IWitness, the Institute’s award-winning educational website.

Explore IWitness

Stephen Feinberg remembers always finding the study of history to be interesting and exciting. During his studies as an undergraduate and graduate student, he was introduced to the history of the Holocaust.

“I became increasingly aware that this was a watershed event in history,” he recalls. “Therefore, I felt that it should be taught in schools.”

On March 19, USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education gave a presentation about education based on Holocaust survivor testimony to more than 100 students, faculty, and staff of the University of Szeged, one of Central Europe’s foremost institutions of higher learning.

USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education was one of a select few organizations invited by the Jewish Family and Children’s Services (JFCS) Holocaust Center to lead a workshop at the Day of Learning. The JFCS organizes the Day of Learning to help young people gain a deeper understanding of the Holocaust and patterns of genocide, and to inspire moral courage and social responsibility in the future. Its many workshops are enhanced by testimonies of Holocaust survivors and survivors of other genocides.

Three professional-development videos for secondary-school teachers are now available on the Institute’s website. The videos, which average 25 minutes in length, delve into the theory and practice of using testimony for education and digital tools such as IWitness.

The weekend before International Holocaust Remembrance Day, experts from Yad Vashem, the Department for Education and Culture of the Jewish Museum in Prague, the Terezin Memorial, and USC Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education held training seminars for teachers in the Czech Republic. The Institute presented its Czech-language educational resources, which are based on the testimony of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses; the seminars reached teachers in the cities of Karlovy Vary, Ostrov nad Ohří and Plzeň.

Kori Street, PhD, director of education for USC Shoah Foundation, will deliver a presentation about its IWitness Program at the University of Miami’s 12th annual Holocaust Teacher Summer Institute on June 13, 2013. Street’s talk, “Learning to Use Holocaust Survivor Testimony in the Classroom,” will address the program’s value in teaching eyewitness history, as well as its ability to help build digital literacy. The Holocaust Teacher Institute is sponsored by the University of Miami School of Education & Human Development and the Miami Dade County Public Schools.

A key USC Shoah Foundation partner’s mission of upgrading public school access to broadband Internet has earned a boost from President Obama. The nonprofit organization EducationSuperHighway works to ensure that every K-12 school in the nation has the necessary capacity to fully leverage the possibilities offered by digital education and online learning. EducationSuperHighway’s advocacy was instrumental in the president’s announcement of ConnectED, an initiative to connect 99 percent of U.S. students to high-speed Internet within the next five years.

The Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre in Toronto has introduced USC Shoah Foundation’s online educational tool, IWitness, to Canadian teachers and students, marking the beginning of the Neuberger Centre’s use of IWitness as part of its educational programming.

USC Shoah Foundation recently hosted a number of eminent guests from the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles. They included: Jerry Coben, a member of the federation’s board of directors in addition to being an emeritus member of the USC Shoah Foundation Board of Councilors; Jay Sanderson, president and chief executive officer; Andrew Cushnir, executive vice president and chief programming officer; and Shira Rosenblatt, vice president of Jewish education and engagement.

Echoes and Reflections, a professional teacher development program on the Holocaust, has now expanded to Alaska. In April, middle and high school educators from across the state journeyed to Kodiak High School on Kodiak Island to participate. In addition to those attending in person, others in remote locations joined via video conferencing.

Crispin Brooks, curator of USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, will deliver a presentation at the Teaching and Working with Holocaust Testimonies Summer 2013 Workshop, to be held July 15–19 at the University of Michigan–Flint. Geared toward high school teachers, college faculty, and graduate students, the conference focuses on information literacy and critical skills in education and research involving online Holocaust survivor video testimonies. The Visual History Archive is a special focus of the event.

USC Shoah Foundation educator workshops continue increasing in number and reach. This summer, the program Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century convened new seminars in Budapest and Prague. In addition, another workshop in Poland is scheduled for November. The program’s offerings draw participants from all across their respective nations.

Professor Andrea Pető of Central European University in Budapest has written an article about how to use USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive in teaching students at the graduate level. The piece appears as a chapter in the seventh volume of Jewish Studies at the Central European University edited by András Kovács and Michael Laurence Miller.

Teachers from all over Hungary gathered in Budapest this month for the six-day introductory seminar to the USC Shoah Foundation’s 2013 Teaching with Testimony for the 21st Century program. But there was one educator among them who didn’t just travel across the country – he came from the other side of the world.

Claudia Ramirez Wiedeman, PhD, has joined USC Shoah Foundation as Associate Director for Educational Technologies and Training. Her duties include strategic, content, and professional development related to the Institute’s flagship web-based educational tool, IWitness, which is designed to make the Visual History Archive accessible to educators and students around the world.

USC Shoah Foundation recently convened its second Teaching with Testimony for the 21st Century seminar in the Czech Republic. Held July 8-12 at the Malach Center for Visual History in Prague, the program attracted educators from throughout the country and also from neighboring Slovakia.

USC Shoah Foundation gave a presentation today about the use of survivor testimony and its educational website IWitness at California State University, Long Beach. The presentation was part of CSU Long Beach’s weeklong Eva and Eugene Schlesinger Teacher Training Endowed Workshop on the Holocaust. The workshop provides Holocaust curriculum development training for high school teachers.

The Jewish Museum in Prague has teamed with USC Shoah Foundation to provide a new testimony-based lesson plan for teachers in the Czech Republic. The lesson, “International Committee of the Red Cross and Terezín,” is about the Terezín ghetto and its use as a source of Nazi propaganda in a 1944 International Red Cross report.