This month – National Poetry Month in the U.S. – is a great time to explore just how powerful words can be.  When it comes to understanding difficult moments in history, poetry and writing can help students process and express their own thoughts about the world. Explore these three ways you can bring poetry into your classroom using tools from Facing History’s partner, USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education.

The newest activity in IWitness draws on testimonies of Holocaust survivors to spark students’ reflection on how identity, and the struggle to hide it, can affect people from all walks of life.

USC Shoah Foundation is expanding its efforts to develop educational resources about the Armenian Genocide with the creation of a new position devoted to the IWitness Armenia program.

As part of the IWitness Detroit program, USC Shoah Foundation education staff hosted a half-day IWitness workshop for educators at the Macomb Intermediate School District (MISD), Michigan, last Tuesday, April 19.

Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom HaShoah as it’s known in Hebrew, commemorates and honors the victims and survivors of the Holocaust. This year, people around the world will remember the victims of the Holocaust May 4-5, 2016.

IWitness’s popular Watch page, which features curated testimony clips and accompanying educational materials, has added new content and features in response to user feedback.

This seminar will extend Echoes & Reflections Teacher's Resource Guide Lessons and work to deepen participant knowledge of the topic through testimony and other IWitness resources.

The education, community and peace-building Rwanda Peace Education Program (RPEP) has concluded after three years, and its partners have begun to evaluate the impact of USC Shoah Foundation’s role in the program, with positive results.

Rob Hadley, USC Shoah Foundation education consultant in the U.S., will lead an introductory IWitness workshop at the one-day seminar “Teaching and Learning About the Holocaust” Saturday, June 4, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

A trio of eighth-graders from New Jersey created a poetry group that has enabled students at their school to express their hardships and appreciation for one another.

In order to properly educate more Czech teachers on how to fully utilize IWitness programs, Senior International Program Consultant and Regional Consultant in the Czech Republic Martin Šmok is holding two teacher training sessions in August.

USC Shoah Foundation education staff are once again on the road this week to introduce educators in Texas and Massachusetts to IWitness.

Updates to IWitness in time for the new school year will include a suite of Spanish-language full-length testimonies, testimony clips and activities from USC Shoah Foundation’s new Guatemalan Genocide collection.

Summer might be a break for students, but as an educator, I know teachers are busy enhancing their skills and knowledge to improve their curriculum and students’ overall experience in their classrooms. As you contemplate lesson plans for the upcoming year, will you be planning a unit or lesson about the Holocaust? Do you feel you have enough knowledge about the topic to teach it well? How will you introduce your students to that history and experiences? What readings and resources will you use? What approach will you take with this sensitive topic?

USC Shoah Foundation’s education regional consultant for the United States, Rob Hadley, is teaching 30 educators about IWitness during the Powell Holocaust Summer Institute at the Henry and Sarah Friedman Holocaust Center for Humanity in Seattle this week, August 8-12.

Find out what new activities, testimonies and enhancements are coming to IWitness in time for the start of the 2016-2017 school year.

Nine teachers gathered at the International school of Brno on Monday for an IWitness hands-on seminar led by Martin Šmok, USC Shoah Foundation’s senior international program consultant based in the Czech Republic.

Students and teachers can now download their video projects constructed in IWitness using the WeVideo editor and their word clouds built in the Information Quest activities. So here are three easy steps for students and teachers to download their work from IWitness!

The two newest activities in IWitness were written by teachers who were inspired to help fellow educators teach their students profound lessons using testimony from the Visual History Archive.

USC Shoah Foundation is accepting applications from students interested in working with testimony for the third year of the Institute’s Junior Intern Program.

The Watch page on IWitness has added Polish-language testimony clips for the first time, plus several other Hungarian and English-language clips, in time for the start of the 2016-2017 school year.

As you prepare your lessons plans for this year’s school year explore seven reasons why you should teach with testimony.

As an educator who has used IWitness to teach various subjects, units and topics here are some tips to integrating testimony into any curriculum, including Science.

Hungarian TV station RTL Klub will air the 2015 film Son of Saul for the first time this Saturday, September 24. The IWitness activity Sonderkommandó, Birkenau was designed as a companion activity to the film for Hungarian students.

Chicago educators will learn about IWitness as an option for helping their students meet the city’s service-learning requirement at a special resource fair on Monday, Oct. 17.

IWitness has partnered with Participant Media and Bleecker Street Media to provide educational resources for the new film Denial, which tells the true story of the Holocaust denial libel trial between Deborah Lipstadt and David Irving.

Testimony clips about immigration will serve as the inspiration for students entering this year’s competition, open to grades 6-12.

USC Shoah Foundation partnered with After School Matters in Chicago for the first time to pilot a brand new IWitness activity “Skittles, Deplorables and ‘All Lives Matter’: Leadership and Media Literacy.”

The Kristallnacht pogrom was a critical turning point on the path to genocide, and all of our #IWitnessChat participants agreed that using testimony is a meaningful way for students to understand and connect with the event. Hearing survivors’ detailed accounts of this night makes it much more accessible to students.

IWitness now offers so many testimony clips and activities in multiple languages that new filters have been added to the Watch page and Activity Library to help users easily discover resources in their own language.