Surrounded by poverty, gangs, drugs and hunger, 25 teenagers from Cleveland High School in Seattle felt like it was all too much to do anything about.

But the students in Jeff Taylor’s humanities class found the inspiration to change the world in a unique way: by participating in IWitness (iwitness.usc.edu), an online tool offered for free to any school by the nonprofit USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education.

With access to some of the Shoah Foundation’s 52,000 audio-visual testimonies of survivors, liberators and rescuers of the Holocaust, IWitness offers students the chance experience history in a way that hits home. Instead of reading facts from textbooks, they feel like they’re building relationships with people who lived through of one of the darkest chapters in human history.

“It creates a unique opportunity,” Taylor said. “Many of my students are at a high poverty level. This was a way for them to see a connection to what happens every day and the Holocaust.”

After completing the lesson, Taylor encouraged his students to participate in the IWitness Video Challenge, a new contest for students to create a video essay on how they improved their own community.

He was surprised at how ambitiously the students tackled the assignment. One built a community garden in a low-income housing complex. Another visited a detention center to speak to immigrants about why they risked so much to come to the United States. Other topics addressed were homophobia on campus and gang violence.

“I have students who are first-generation African immigrants trying to break apart from tribalism and gang violence in Seattle. The scope of what they attempted to take on was amazing.”

And now, the students all have a chance to win a trip to Los Angeles to participate in some of the Shoah Foundation’s 20^th anniversary activities. Deadline to enter is Dec. 2.

IWitness spurs students do more than watch testimony. It compels them to think, to make smart choices and to create their own project from what they’ve learned. By encouraging teachers and students to create their own lesson plans, IWitness allows them to expand on practically any subject they wish to pursue. From civics, government and history to poetry, art and ethics, IWitness is designed for educators to tailor lessons appropriate for their classrooms.

And by using the embedded editor, students not only learn valuable editing skills, but also how to make ethical editing decisions that ensure their finished assignments are a fair and accurate reflection of what they’ve seen. All work is kept safe inside the IWitness site and not accessible to the public.

Taylor said he didn’t expect the students to have such a strong reaction to the program.

“When I started this, I thought students would think very small,” he said. “My students are typically disenfranchised. They don’t feel like they have agency or access.”

But the students embraced the program in a way he found both surprising and inspiring.

“I know they will remember that for a brief moment, kids with no access took on a problem,” he said. “The way they felt when they were done was unbelievable.”