English and composition teacher Oriana Packer, of Brockton High School in Brockton, Mass., assigned her junior students the IWitness Video Challenge. Here, three of them share what it was like to watch testimony for the first time. (In the photo, left to right: Kweku Quansah, Lucia Ugbesia, Alexandra Eugene, Oriana Packer) When did you first learn about the Holocaust?

Ian McAvoy teaches English and Film Arts at University City High School in San Diego, Calif. He learned about IWitness after visiting the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust with his class. He said the IWitness Video Challenge appealed to him because his students could use the website’s editing tools largely independently, and it would require them to synthesize their diverse learning about the Holocaust (via testimony, the museum trip, Elie Wiesel’s Night, and history classes) while encouraging altruism.

For Alessandro Marazzi Sassoon, last summer’s Problems Without Passports trip to Rwanda was an opportunity to take the study of post-genocide society one step further. Sassoon ’14 is an international relations major at the University of Southern California, concentrating on foreign policy analysis and security studies. After growing up in New York and Paris and completing a study abroad trip to Sweden, Finland and Russia, Sassoon was excited to visit central Africa for the first time.

Anoush Krikorian was interviewed by the filmmaker J. Michael Hagopian over 10 years ago about his experiences as a survivor of the Armenian Genocide. Now, Krikorian’s granddaughter is working to make sure his voice, and the voices of over 400 other survivors, are preserved in one of USC Shoah Foundation’s newest collections.

By the time Lorry Black finishes his dissertation, the music of the Holocaust may very well be brought back to life. Black is finishing his first semester as a doctoral student in sacred music at the USC Thornton School of Music. He was one of USC Shoah Foundation’s summer 2013 research fellows, conducting research in the Visual History Archive for his dissertation about the music of French concentration camps during the Holocaust.