The IWitness Video Challenge is a 21st century skill builder - teaching students how to use digital tools such as video editors to craft multimedia essays. Most importantly, the challenge provides students the opportunity to positively enhance their digital citizenship as they network and collaborate with others to deal with real world problems.

This series will highlight one teaching activity per day for 10 days, pairing eyewitness testimony with standards-aligned lessons that transform learning.

In this activity, students will examine the impact that personal stories can have in inspiring others to action. They will listen and reflect on genocide survivor testimonies, discuss the concept of leadership and form belief statements about how they can become leaders in their communities.

By collecting clips of testimony to construct a "GeoStory" - a map and timeline with videos - students can discover how changes in time and place shape history.

The release follows the recent completion of 489 interviews with the survivors of the Guatemala Genocide at the hands of the Guatemalan military in the early 1980s.

In my role as part of USC Shoah Foundation’s Education Department, I have the honor of working with our team members both in the United States and around the world to create localized educational content using genocide survivor testimony. As a former classroom teacher and a lifelong believer in the importance of experiential learning, I was fortunate to take part in three IWalks in Budapest, Hungary, Prague, Czechia, and Warsaw, Poland while on a recent vacation.

The USC Shoah Foundation is looking for students in 7th– 12th grades who are interested in participating in its highly competitive William P. Lauder Junior Internship Program. The program provides a dynamic and unique learning opportunity for students to engage with testimonies – personal stories – from survivors and witnesses of genocide.

Lisa Farese’s eighth-graders learn about hate and ethical editing by watching IWitness videos, and then go to different corners of the school to discuss important issues.

At a time when the term “fake news” has become pervasive – and when rising nationalism worldwide has had an especially pronounced effect on Central Europe – USC Shoah Foundation’s representatives in the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary are introducing high school students to a suite of new IWitness activities that use testimony to provide a deeper understanding of propaganda.

During the Institute's inaugural summer William P. Lauder Internship Program, about two-dozen young people came to USC Shoah Foundation from across the country to participate in the intensive program, which focused on the causes and impacts of injustice and the ways an individual can respond.

USC Shoah Foundation’s annual Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century program is a one-year professional development initiative for educators that begins with a six-day seminar for educators.

This is the first year USC’s Undergraduate Student Government leaders have used clips of testimony for the orientation event. The new IWitness University activity is called "Countering Intolerance in Co-Curricular Spaces."

Ignited by students’ enthusiasm over IWitness's recent “100 Days to Inspire Respect” initiative, a campaign called #180DaysToInspireRespect has students at Robert Adams Middle School in Massachusetts volunteering each day to present about the respectful acts they’ve witnessed, received, read and heard about.

Education and Outreach Specialist Sedda Antekelian and Program Officer Manuk Avedikyan shared information about the educational use of testimony in the Institute’s Visual History Archive and on the Institute’s educational website, IWitness.

The Stronger Than Hate initiative will publish stories on a regular basis that will each highlight a separate learning activity in IWitness, tackling some of today’s toughest subjects for students in middle school, high school and universities.

In this activity, students examine stories that have the power to strengthen our human connection or create deep divides leading to hate, intolerance and violence.

Learning from eyewitnesses of some of history’s darkest moments, educators strive to teach the power of decency and respect.