For USC Shoah Foundation’s education department, led by director Kori Street, PhD, being involved in the Auschwitz: The Past is Present program is a historic opportunity to demonstrate USC Shoah Foundation’s commitment to sharing and teaching survivors’ stories.USC Shoah Foundation is partnering with Discovery Communications on the education component of Auschwitz: The Past is Present, a global communications and education program that will support the official observance of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 2015.

Through his work with the University of London Institute of Education’s Centre for Holocaust Education, Tony Cole teaches “hard to reach” students, who have social, emotional, behavioral or physical needs. But while these students face significant learning challenges, Cole has found IWitness to be an effective and powerful tool to teach them about the Holocaust.

Jared McBride, the first-ever Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellow at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, says testimony isn’t just an important aspect of his upcoming book manuscript. It can help prove that the controversial history he studies even happened.

Since Barbara Jaffe first learned about the USC Shoah Foundation 10 years ago, she has participated in its Master Teacher professional development program, created her own IWitness activities, and has seen her students become just as affected by Holocaust survivor testimony as she is.

USC Shoah Foundation’s Memory, Media and Technology: Exploring the Trajectories of Schindler’s List conference will welcome not just genocide, Holocaust and history scholars, but also experts in media and film. As panel moderator, Johanna Blakley is looking forward to the conference’s discussions of technology and digital communication.

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.

Though her students are only 10 or 11 years old, Suzi Gantz jumped at the chance to introduce them to IWitness for USC Shoah Foundation’s first elementary classroom pilot of a new IWitness activity.Gantz’s fifth grade class at O. A. Thorp Scholastic Academy in Chicago is currently pilot-testing an unpublished IWitness Mini Quest activity: “Use Your Voice Against Prejudice.” USC Shoah Foundation staff reached out to elementary teachers in the Chicago area for any who would be interested in piloting an IWitness activity, and Gantz was selected after a brief screening process.

At the Canadian International School of Beijing (CISB), Gary Goodwin’s students represent an especially vast range of nationalities and backgrounds. So it’s only fitting that he uses IWitness to teach not just the Holocaust, but also the Nanjing Massacre and Rwandan Tutsi Genocide.Goodwin teaches 10th, 11th, and 12th grade humanities within CISB’s International Baccalaureate curriculum. He was inspired by Schindler’s List to get a master’s in history and from researching the movie discovered USC Shoah Foundation and IWitness.

For many educators in the greater Los Angeles area, Matthew Friedman is their first introduction to teaching the Holocaust.

Simone Gigliotti teaches in the history program at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, and is a member of the Holocaust Geographies Collective, a group of researchers who study the Holocaust in terms of geography and movement of survivors and victims. She is the first official visiting scholar to the Center, which includes a week-long residency for Gigliotti to conduct research in the Visual History Archive and give a public lecture at USC.

Brooke Horn inspires her students to think about how they can change the world. To do so, she drew on the first-ever IWitness Video Challenge, with award-winning results.Horn, a seventh and eighth grade language arts teacher at Coppell Middle School North in Texas, uses IWitness as a resource for her students to learn from survivors and apply lessons from testimony to current social topics.

After experiencing intolerance throughout her life, Emily Bengels has strived to model kindness and acceptance for her students at Readington Middle School in New Jersey. Participating in USC Shoah Foundation and Discovery Education’s professional development program Auschwitz: The Past is Present will, she hopes, guide her teaching of the Holocaust and inspire her students to stand up for humanity.

Though his students at Agohozo-Shalom Youth Village in Rwanda are all too familiar with genocide, Gamariel Mbonimana has found IWitness to be an engaging, powerful tool that sparks their curiosity.Agohozo-Shalom Youth Village (ASYV), in Rwamagana, is home to more than 500 orphaned and vulnerable children. Mbonimana teaches General Paper courses to upper secondary students and was one of the first teachers to attend USC Shoah Foundation’s IWitness educator training sessions at Kigali Genocide Memorial in 2013.

At 12 years old, Anna Krisztina Berecz first learned about the Holocaust from Miklos Nyiszli’s book Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account.  The experience was so haunting that she decided to forget it as quickly as possible.

From her master’s thesis to the Holocaust workshops she leads for students in England, the Visual History Archive has always been an important part of Jennifer Craig-Norton’s work.

When Christa Calkins travels to Poland on USC Shoah Foundation and Discovery Education’s Auschwitz: The Past is Present professional development program this January, her students back home will be right there with her –at least virtually.

At the University of the Aegean in Greece, Pothiti Hantzaroula says IWitness helps her students understand the impact of the Holocaust on their own lives and the lives of others.

Living and working in the UNESCO World Heritage city of Trebic, Czech Republic, Daniela Vitaskova often teaches history by taking her students to historical sites. As one of 25 teachers chosen to travel to Poland to attend the Auschwitz: The Past is Present professional development program in January, Vitaskova will prepare herself to take her students to Auschwitz later next year.

Even in the earliest days of the USC Shoah Foundation, a staff of hundreds worked around the world to conduct interviews and create educational materials that used testimony to teach about the Holocaust. Yet, if they were based oversees, they probably never had the opportunity to visit the foundation’s headquarters in Los Angeles. That was Annette Wulf until just a few months ago, when she visited the office for the first time.

Keith Meador doesn’t mind that his students say they’d rather watch videos in class than listen to him lecture.That’s because the videos they are referring to are USC Shoah Foundation testimonies.

Milena Santerini, a professor and representative in Italian Parliament, has been a longtime partner and supporter of the Giving Memory a Future project with USC Shoah Foundation. That’s because she believes it is vital to teach Italians the true story of the Roma/Sinti people so that this long-excluded minority can find its place in Italian life.