Tenth grade world history teacher Joseph Christensen, from Northwest Career and Technical Academy in Las Vegas, is an avid user of IWitness after discovering it a year ago.

Last year he attended a professional development program about teaching Holocaust in the classroom. One of the presenters showed the IWitness website and database and explained how he used it in his classroom. After searching through the website, Christensen decided to also give it a try.

IWitness provides access to 1,467 full life histories, testimonies of survivors and witnesses to the Holocaust and other genocides for guided exploration. 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.

Christensen assigns his students to think of a question they would want to ask a Holocaust survivor. Then, they must search IWitness to find survivors answering their question and edit a video combining several of these clips.

He notices that students’ reactions to watching testimony are quite strong. He can tell how invested they become in the survivors’ stories and sees that it stays with them even after they’ve left IWitness.

“Students become pretty intense when they are actually watching it. It really draws them in,” Christensen said. “Later, I hear comments about how sad or unbelievable the stories were.”

Echoing many teachers who use testimony in the classroom, Christensen said IWitness is valuable because it allows students to watch actual survivors telling their stories, which is more engaging for the students.

“They are seeing primary resources and that has a more personal effect and connection for the students,” he said.