Echoes and Reflections

This is an Enhanced Learning Opportunity for past program participants 

Delving deeply into one or more selected lessons in the Teacher’s Resource Guide, this professional development program examines the primary and secondary sources that comprise the lesson as well as additional resources available on the website.

Participants engage in deeper exploration of testimony-based multimedia activities and resources in IWitness—the educational website integrated with Echoes and Reflections. IWitness provides educators with easily accessible resources that complement and extend the lessons in the Teacher’s Resource Guide.

Echoes and Reflections delivers value to both experienced Holocaust educators who are supplementing their curricula and for teachers new to Holocaust education.

IWitness has unveiled its annual update which includes five new upgrades. Here they are:

• Guatemalan Genocide activities

The upgrade includes two new IWitness activities in Spanish about the genocidal campaign against indigenous Guatemalans at the hands of their own government. “Memorias de Rio Negro: Jesús Tecú Osorio” teaches about the history of Guatemala and shows clips from Osorio’s testimony to convey how the genocide affected the life of one individual. “Guatemala: A Silent Genocide” teaches about the origin, history and phases of the genocide against the Mayan population of Guatemala from 1981-83.

• Mini Lessons

IWitness debuts a brand-new type of activity: mini lessons. Testimony-based mini lessons are designed to provide teachers with a readily accessible teaching resource for targeted instruction on skills (such as annotating text) or concepts (such as prejudice) that can be used within an existing lesson or unit. Each mini lesson will include 1-2 clips of testimony from the Watch page on IWitness and is intended to take 15-30 minutes to complete.

• Downloadable Student Work

Students can now download their work from IWitness including video projects and word clouds. They can also share these projects on social media using the hashtag #USCIWitness.

• Rubrics

To help teachers grade their students’ work, IWitness is debuting new rubrics. These rubrics will provide guidelines for teachers to follow when grading their students’ completed IWitness activities such as video activities and information quests.

• More New Activities

In addition to the two Spanish-language activities about the Guatemalan Genocide, IWitness will add five more learning activities: “Righteous Among the Nations,” “Einsatzgruppen: The Firing Squads of the Holocaust,” and “The Danger of a Single Story” – all in English – and two more in Hungarian, “Dörnhau - Tenyérbe rejtett rajzok” and “Sonderkommando (Son of Saul).”