Regional Consultant Liz Bommarito Presents IWitness at Midwood High School, Brooklyn

Liz Bommarito, USC Shoah Foundation’s IWitness regional consultant based in New York, introduced her colleagues at Midwood High School to IWitness at a presentation today.

Bommarito gave a presentation to her school’s English department, most of which doesn’t teach Holocaust literature. Since the school has been investing in iPads, she demonstrated how they can use IWitness on their new iPads next semester.

IWitness provides access to nearly 1,300 full life histories, testimonies of survivors and other witnesses to the Holocaust and other genocides for guided exploration. Students can watch testimonies and use them in individual or group multimedia projects; teachers can assign activities as classwork or homework, and can even custom-build their own lessons and activities. The testimonies are searchable by more than 9,000 keywords, enabling students to pinpoint exact moments of interest within each testimony, which averages two hours in length.

IWitness has registered users in 57 countries and all 50 states, including 5,000 educators and nearly 18,000 students.

Liz Bommarito has been using IWitness in her English classes for the past two years. Her senior class worked on the IWitness Video Challenge last fall, and the top five students, as voted by the class, attended USC Shoah Foundation’s 2013 Ambassadors for Humanity Gala. Bommarito was a featured speaker at the gala, and talked about the profound impact that testimony had on her students.

IWitness regional consultants Brandon Barr, Michelle Clark and Brandon Haas joined Bommarito at USC Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles for a seminar in March.