IWitness has gone through many changes since Michael Berson and his doctoral education students were among the first to pilot it three years ago. But for Berson, IWitness remains one of the most valuable tools for engaging students with testimony and teaching them about the Holocaust and other topics.

Marianna Bergida grew up with little knowledge of most of her family – her mother, sister, cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles were killed in Auschwitz when she was very young, and her father couldn’t speak about his own experiences during the Holocaust. Determined to not let other descendants of survivors lose their family history as she had, Bergida became an interviewer for the Shoah Foundation and ended up interviewing one of the real-life inspirations of Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List.

Laura Pritchard Dobrin was inspired to create the first-ever teacher-authored activity in IWitness by one of her own favorite educators – and in the process, produced a lesson that teaches students about not just the Holocaust, but also a fascinating poet named Lotte Kramer.

After years of working with the USC Shoah Foundation and running the Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival, Hilary Helstein admits she still couldn’t make sense of the Holocaust. But through art, she found her way in – and so have audiences around the world who have watched her film As Seen Through These Eyes.

Judy LaPietra was one of the first to learn about USC Shoah Foundation’s new educational website, IWitness, and from then on she has remained one of its most avid users.LaPietra teaches eighth grade history at St. Mark Catholic School in Huntersville, NC, and also created and teaches three courses in the global studies department at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte: “The Legacy of the Holocaust,” “Bearing Witness to the Past:  A Journey to Auschwitz” and “Representations of the Holocaust.” She has even taken her college students on trips to Poland to visit Auschwitz.

While re-watching Schindler’s List before applying to present at USC Shoah Foundation’s upcoming international conference “Memory, Media and Technology: Exploring the Trajectories of Schindler’s List,” Peg LeVine was struck by the numerous examples of “ritual annihilation” perpetrated against the Jews in the film, such as the ransacking of synagogues and homes and the destroying of religious objects.

The students in Leslie Schaffer’s Holocaust studies elective last semester didn’t visit a Holocaust museum – with the help of IWitness, they created their own.Schaffer, a guidance counselor at Abbeville High School in Greenville, SC, who also teaches an interdisciplinary Holocaust elective course, said because the school isn’t located close enough to a Holocaust museum for the students to visit, her class came up with the idea to make their own museum at their school. She discovered IWitness while brainstorming for the project and thought immediately that it would be “perfect.”

At the brand-new POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Zofia Mioduszewska has perhaps one of the most rewarding jobs: helping to educate the museum’s youngest visitors about the Holocaust and Jewish life in Poland.

In a field dedicated to organizing and preserving information, it makes sense that USC Shoah Foundation archivists Sandra Aguilar and Daryn Eller say archivists are, as a whole, a particularly helpful bunch.“That’s what we do – we share information from the archive to the public and to our users and researchers, and we also share information with each other,” Aguilar said. “It’s a really nice community to be working in because of the people and how incredibly knowledgeable they are.”“It’s true,” Eller agreed. “It’s one of the professions that are about openness.”

IWitness focuses heavily on the Holocaust, but the themes of tolerance and racism contained in its genocide survivor testimonies and activities help Steve Flynn teach his students important lessons about challenges they face in their own lives.