Peggy Walker’s students at McCall Middle School in Massachusetts have changed the way they do research based on their experience with IWitness.

Walker first began using IWitness last year, after using educational resources she found on the USC Shoah Foundation website. She began exploring IWitness and said she “immediately” saw the potential it could have for her students.

Her school has struggled recently with bringing Holocaust survivors to speak to the eighth graders during their Holocaust unit, since the survivors were not always able to speak to a large group of 350 students, and sometimes had trouble answering all the questions the students wanted to ask.

But IWitness offered another avenue for students to hear directly from survivors. Before their trip to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC., eighth graders do a research project in their English class on an aspect of the Holocaust that they have questions about. Last year, Walker had students investigate IWitness independently, and based on their feedback, this year she required students to use IWitness as a primary source for their projects.

The site is easy for students to navigate on their own and find testimonies relevant to their research topic, she said.

One student was looking into children who had been saved by Father Trocme and the community of Le Chambon, France, and she came across the name of a family whose children had been separated. This bothered her because she has siblings herself.

“When she searched their name in IWitness, she found testimony from one of the family members that allowed her to see that they had indeed been reunited, offering a satisfying conclusion for her research,” Walker said.

​This site has changed the way her students do research, Walker said. They were much more likely to view several sources in IWitness because the information was tagged, allowing them to go directly to relevant testimony.

Walker added that IWitness allows students to teach themselves about a topic, and this process is extremely rewarding.

“Unlike a webquest, which often requires students to sift through pages and layers of information to get to their specific topic, IWitness allows students to listen to clips of varying lengths,” she said. “The variety of sources proved to offer a more rewarding experience for the students, allowing them agency and promoting a sense of investment in their topic.”