LOS ANGELES, June 26, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- While
students across America enjoy their summer vacation, the education
department at USC Shoah Foundation is
busily making major new features to its award-winning IWitness
educational website for educators and their students that will be
ready by the time school resumes in the fall.
Coming on the heels of a successful initiative, 100 Days to
Inspire Respect, these new offerings will further support educators
around the world by building new and innovative ways to inspire
respect and empower students to take positive action in the
world.
The first new addition is IWitness360, a new space in IWitness
for virtual reality films and supporting educational resources that
made its debut today at the International Society for Technology in
Education conference in San
Antonio.
The first VR film available, titled Lala, tells the true
story of a dog that brightened the lives of a family interned by
the Nazis in the Lodz Ghetto during the Holocaust.
Narrated by 88-year-old Roman
Kent, the 360-degree VR film traces the movements of his
Jewish family – and their dog – when Kent was a boy, starting with
their idyllic life at a home in the Polish countryside, and
concluding at the Lodz Ghetto, where they were sent upon
discovery.
Developed in partnership with Discovery Communications,
Discovery Education and Global Nomads Group, Lala is
packaged with activities, testimony clips, and other resources that
explore topics such as stereotypes, bystanders, oppression and
resistance.
IWitness360 is just one of several upgrades USC Shoah Foundation is bringing to IWitness this
summer before school resumes in the fall.
Others upgrades include:
- A new interactive feature called IWalks, which enables students
to take virtual or on-location walking tours through neighborhoods
in certain cities around the world while viewing testimonies from
the Visual History Archive on their mobile devices – intercut with
historical images, maps and other historical artifacts – telling
the first-person accounts of what happened in those same
neighborhoods decades earlier.
- New language-specific portals, which bring together robust
content for teachers and students in several languages including
Hungarian, Spanish, Czech, Polish and Ukrainian.
"This is a challenging time to be a young person, but we know
that IWitness can have a lasting positive effect," said
USC Shoah Foundation Director of
Education Dr. Claudia Wiedeman.
"These new activities build on the 100 Days to Inspire Respect
initiative to help students become better people and to do their
part to build a better world."
Read details about these and other new addition to IWitness each
Friday at sfi.usc.edu.
About USC Shoah
Foundation
USC Shoah Foundation — The Institute
for Visual History and Education is dedicated to making audio-
visual interviews with survivors and other witnesses of the
Holocaust and other genocides, a compelling voice for education and
action. The Institute's current collection of more than 54,000
eyewitness testimonies contained within its Visual History
Archive® preserves history as told by the people who
lived it, and lived through it. Housed at the University of Southern California, within the Dana
and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, the
Institute works with partners around the world to advance
scholarship and research, to provide resources and online tools for
educators, and to disseminate the testimonies for educational
purposes.
Contact: Josh Grossberg
213-740-6065
josh.grossberg@usc.edu
Rob Kuznia 213-740-0965
rkuznia@usc.edu
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SOURCE USC Shoah Foundation