Let's Get Digital: Celebrating Digital Learning Day 2016

Happy Digital Learning Day! Led by Alliance for Excellent Education, Digital Learning Day is an effort to engage students and empower educators through effective use of digital tools. Educators, schools and organizations around the world will be sharing the power of using digital resources in the classroom. 

IWitness is a valuable digital resource with more than 1,500 survivor testimonies to the Holocaust and other genocides and student centered activities designed to engage multiple literacies. As an educator with 18-years experience and now training specialist here at USC Shoah Foundation, I know firsthand the transformative power of teaching with testimony through multimedia activities.  While we have a wide selection of actives across curriculums I encourage you on this Digital Learning Day to introduce your students to the 2016 IWitness Video Challenge.  

The challenge invites students to positively contribute to their communities, and submit short videos explaining the inspiration behind their actions and extraordinary impact. The IWitness Video Challenge is open to all secondary school students in the United States and Canada who attend public, private or home schools. More than $10,000 in prizing from Ford Motor Co. will be awarded to students, teachers and schools who submit wining video essays about their experience.

Through IWitness students are able to strengthen digital literacy skills and 21st century competencies while also impacting their social-emotional development. Each multimedia activity, including the IWitness Video Challenge guides students through the framework of the 4C’s consider, collect, construct and communicate.

In the IWitness Video Challenge activity students watch clips of testimony, create an action plan to make a difference in their community and to capture the impact of their work on video.

Tips to introduce your students to the 2016 IWitness Video Challenge

• Register for IWitness
• Watch the recorded webinar on the 2016 IWitness Video Challenge
• Assign the activity to your students
• Encourage your students to submit their video
• Teach students that power is inherent in the individual -- any act of kindness can go a long way - be it a smile or an upstander action

The IWitness Video Challenge is a 21^st century skill builder – teaching students how to use digital tools such as video editors to craft multimedia essays. Most importantly it provides students the opportunity to positively enhance their digital citizenship as they network and collaborate with others to deal with real world problems.

This Digital Learning Day inspire your students to make a difference while enhancing their digital literacy skills and critical thinking. Make sure to share photos of your students working on in IWitness with #USCIWitness and #DLDay.