A Cybrary of the Holocaust

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Oil on Canvas, Marching Out to Work, Mieczyslaw Koscielniak
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Created in 1995, this site presents an impressive body of primary and secondary source materials about the Holocaust. Offers an wide range of contemporary and historical resources, including more than 100 images from concentration camps and the Warsaw ghetto; more than 30 drawings and paintings by Holocaust survivors; interactive maps of two concentration camps; the text of the 1942 Wannsee Protocols; four interviews with historians; lesson plans for teaching about the Holocaust to school children; background essays; survivor narratives, poetry, and literature; letters, speeches, and posters by Nazi perpetrators; and scores of links. A sophisticated search engine guides users through the site's poorly organized and sometimes confusing interface. The site's author is a website marketing consultant. Particularly useful for secondary school teachers seeking to design student projects, this is an extremely rich collection of material.

IWitness

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Film still, Ellis Lewin, 4 December 1996, IWitness
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IWitness is an incredible resource for educators intent on bringing awareness and analysis of the Holocaust to their classroom. The site offers more than 1,000 video testimony clips from Holocaust survivors, liberators, and others. These videos can be browsed by topic (from "Anti-Jewish Laws" to "Warsaw Ghetto Uprising") or searched by name or topic. Searching provides a few benefits for lesson planning. For one, video search results will play the portion of a clip containing information related to your search, making it easy to decide if the result is actually relevant to your classroom plans. In addition, searches may reveal related materials such as photographs of artifacts in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum collection or encyclopedia articles providing additional information and context.

You can also register as an educator or a student. Educators can assign activities and view student work (only viewable by the specific student and the teacher). Students can watch videos on items such as understanding testimony and archives or editing video interviews in an ethical manner. Activities that call for video editing allow students to save clips into a library for future use in their projects and prepare their own videos using video-editing tools which are part of the website—no download needed.

For a quick introduction to the site, consider watching the six-minute demonstration video linked at the top of the About Us page.

Interested in learning more about IWitness? Read teacher Brandon Haas's Tech for Teachers article.

Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution

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Photo, Sonia Pressman Fuentes receiving EOCP Award, Jewish Women and. . .
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This exhibit explores the contributions of Jewish women in Feminism's "Second Wave" during which Jewish women helped work "to transform American society and Jewish life in America." It offers a collection of images, a timeline, and six thematic essays. The interactive timeline using the exhibit images allows the visitor to follow the role of Jewish women in the resurgence of the feminist movement from the 1960s through the end of the 20th century. The thematic essays—"Foremothers," "From Silence to Voice," "Setting the Feminist Agenda," "The Personal is Political," "Feminism is Judaism," and "Confronting Power"—combine images, audio clips, and statements from prominent Jewish feminists, as well as short biographies of the feminists. The visitor can search the entire collection of more than 90 objects and stories from Jewish feminists used in the essays or browse the collection by person, format, topic, or date. A useful resource for researching Jewish women or the history of the feminist movement.

IWitness

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What is it?

IWitness is a free resource developed by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute to help students develop a deeper understanding of 20th-century history alongside digital and media literacies. It houses approximately 1,000 Holocaust survivor and witness testimonies and allows students to construct multimedia projects using the testimonies. Users need only an Internet connection; all of the tools—including an online video editor—are self-contained on the server and are compatible with both Macs and PCs.

Getting Started

In order to start using IWitness, click here and select “register.” Once registered, you will be able to create classes and generate access codes students can use to register.

Teachers are using IWitness as a way to integrate 21st-century literacies into a range of subjects.

Even prior to registering, the IWitness home page features a rotating group of curated clips. These short clips run less than five minutes and draw learners into compelling stories. Linked from the home page, the Browse All Topics page provides more clips from a breadth of topics to anyone visiting the site. Registered users are able to search among more than 1,000 full-length testimonies, then save clips from the testimonies for use in projects. Testimonies have been indexed to the minute with keywords. If, for example, students search for “music,” they will get a list of clips where the interviewee discusses music, and they can go right to the exact minute in which music is discussed in a testimony. Users also can narrow search results in various ways.

Once signed in, you should go to your “Dashboard” to get started exploring IWitness. From here you will notice videos located on the left side under “Connections.” The Connections videos will help you address important topics with your students: ethical editing of video clips, effective searching, and defining terms like “archive” and “testimony.” There is an Educators page designed to orient teachers to the site and highlight available resources. There is also a resource tab on the top of the screen with links to reliable information. For students and teachers alike, IWitness offers a Tool Kit, which can fly out from the right side of the screen. The Tool Kit provides users with quick access to their assigned activities, as well as to an encyclopedia, glossary, and note-taking tool.

IWitness has numerous activities you can assign to your students. More than 200 activities are available in several languages and cover an array of subjects from the Holocaust and genocide to cinema and media & digital literacy. Different types of activities present information in diverse formats and can be filtered for different age or subject levels. “Information Quest”, for example, focuses on a single survivor or witness of the Holocaust. Students listen carefully for information in testimony clips and then reflect on their learning by using, among other things, a world cloud tool. As an educator, you are also able to build your own activities for your students in IWitness with the “Activity Builder”. The additional resources offered on the “Resources” page provide bibliographies, glossaries, and timelines that may be useful when assigning activities for students to build or complete.

Examples
IWitness allows students to learn about . . . the 20th century while creating meaningful projects and making connections with their own lives.

Teachers are using IWitness as a way to integrate 21st-century literacies into a range of subjects, including social studies, language arts, media studies, psychology, and more. One history teacher built an IWitness activity so his students could compare and contrast the Hollywood portrayal of the Sobibor Uprising in film with how survivors of the event remember and describe it. Through his IWitness activity “Escape From Sobibor: Hollywood and Memory,” his students were able to use critical thinking as they watched testimony and compared it to the film, then select clips of that testimony to construct a more historical depiction of daily life in the concentration camp.

You can also use IWitness to help teach online etiquette and respectful dialogue skills. Within IWitness, students finish their activities by viewing and commenting on their classmates’ projects. This is a great way to spark conversation that can continue in IWitness through social-media-style commenting tools. Teachers are able to mediate conversations and communicate with students within the application. IWitness also provides reminders to students about good digital citizenship when communicating with their peers within the site. IWitness allows students to learn about important events in the 20th century while creating meaningful projects and making connections with their own lives.

For more information

Want to learn more about IWitness? See Teachinghistory.org's Website Review for more information.

Looking for more resources on the Holocaust? Teachinghistory.org has gathered website reviews, lesson plans, teaching strategies, and more on the Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust spotlight page.

Organizing History Through Images

Teaser

In this lesson, students will organize photographs both chronologically and conceptually in order to construct a narrative of the Holocaust.

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Description

Students organize photographs from the U.S. Holocaust Museum both chronologically and conceptually in order to construct a narrative of the Holocaust.

Article Body

In this lesson, students organize photographs in order to tell the story of the Holocaust and construct an evidentiary narrative that makes sense to them. The lesson does not include any “correct” ordering or organization of the photographs and instead encourages students to experiment with organizing them both chronologically and thematically.

This lesson also guides students through the process of revising conclusions based on the discovery of additional historical evidence. Students are given a definition of the Holocaust and asked to consider or revise the definition with each new photograph in order to illustrate how historical narratives change depending on the available evidence.

Reading and analyzing primary texts can often be a daunting task for students who struggle with basic literacy skills. However, because this lesson presents historical data in the form of photographs, it is an excellent way to provide all students with access to the historical process, and to support historical thinking with struggling readers or English language learners.

For more advanced or older students, the supplementary activity asks students to read and incorporate brief testimonies of survivors into their definition of the Holocaust.

Topic
The Holocaust
Time Estimate
2 Class Sessions
flexibility_scale
4
Rubric_Content_Accurate_Scholarship

Yes

Rubric_Content_Historical_Background

Yes
The lesson requires students to “read” photographs and write a detailed “definition” of the Holocaust.

Rubric_Content_Read_Write

Yes
Captions and dates for each photograph are included in the lesson. There are additional background materials available.

Rubric_Analytical_Construct_Interpretations

Yes
Students construct an interpretation of the Holocaust using photographs.

Rubric_Analytical_Close_Reading_Sourcing

Yes
Students closely “read” photographs and accompanying source information.

Rubric_Scaffolding_Appropriate

Yes
Some of the photographs are disturbing (as is to be expected given the lesson’s topic).

Rubric_Scaffolding_Supports_Historical_Thinking

Yes
A student worksheet guides students through the process of analyzing each photograph and helps them focus on relevant details.

Rubric_Structure_Assessment

Yes
Some general strategies for assessment are provided. Teachers will want to determine and communicate their criteria for assessment.

Rubric_Structure_Realistic

Yes

Rubric_Structure_Learning_Goals

Yes

Life After the Holocaust: Stories of Holocaust Survivors After The War

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This website presents the stories of six Holocaust survivors—three men, three women; five born in Poland and one in Czechoslovakia—who immigrated to the United States after World War II. Visitors can either listen to the six 30-minute interviews in their entirety, or listen to interview clips surrounding six themes: "starting over," "arriving in New York," "living with the past," "speaking out," "faith, guilt, and responsibility," and "telling their children." Many of the survivors begin by talking about their experiences before the war, and proceed to explain the complexities of starting over in the United States after the war.

Each interview is interspersed with narration and accompanied by photographs and other personal memorabilia, helping visitors better contextualize the narrators' stories. Audio files and interview transcripts are downloadable, making this website's resources useful in classroom settings, as well as to a broader public interested in understanding the aftermath of the Holocaust through deeply personal accounts.

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Website

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Interactive exhibitions and resources address the Holocaust and related subjects. The site is composed of five sections: education, research, history, remembrance, and conscience.

"Education" introduces the subject of the Holocaust and provides extensive bibliographies. "Research" contains a survivor registry and an international directory of activities relating to Holocaust-era assets. Searchable catalogs pertaining to the Museum's collections and library are easy to navigate to find artworks, artifacts, documents, photographs, films, videos, oral histories, and music. "History" includes the Holocaust Learning Center, with images, essays, and documents on 75 subjects, such as anti-Semitism, refugees, pogroms, extermination camps, and resistance. "Committee on Conscience" contains information on current genocidal practices in Sudan.