Facing History in New York, in partnership with WNYC Radio’s Radio Rookies program, helps public high school students develop digital storytelling skills through the Neighborhood to Neighborhood project. Each year, students in the program tackle complex questions about identity, race, education, and crime and violence in their communities. Using interviewing skills and multimedia tools, the students produce original visual and audio pieces.

Facing History in New York, in partnership with WNYC Radio’s Radio Rookies program, helps public high school students develop digital storytelling skills through the Neighborhood to Neighborhood project. Each year, students in the program tackle complex questions about identity, race, education, and crime and violence in their communities. Using interviewing skills and multimedia tools, the students produce original visual and audio pieces.

At Facing History, we spend a lot of time thinking about the questions, actions, and choices people worldwide made in the aftermath of violent events throughout history – events ranging from the Armenian Genocide to the Holocaust to the American civil rights movement. This exploration of historical events allows us to both investigate the complexity of the events as well as reflect upon connections to ourselves and today with a grounding of historical understanding.

I was fortunate to be a teacher participant in Facing History's Digital Media Innovation Network (DMIN). The support and the ideas from DMIN have helped me transform my classroom teaching, and each year there are new and exciting materials and resources shared from DMIN that continually enhances my classroom teaching. This past year one of the new resources IWitness was an amazing web resource that I incorporated into my class. This resource allowed my students to view multiple short eye witness testimony from Holocaust survivors. This particular resource is one I plan on using for as long as I teach the Facing History course. I am always excited when I receive an email about another great resource being shared by DMIN. I look forward to when we can all meet again.

As Facing History teachers we know the power of people’s stories and using these stories in a way that provides students with the tools they need to make decisions about historical events and people and apply that knowledge to themselves and their community. One way to bring your lesson literally to life is to use IWitness this online tool was created by the USC Shoah Foundation. It is an online application for educators and students, giving them access to watch, search, and learn from over 1,000 video testimonies of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust.

As we continue with our summer online courses, it's a good time to think about tools and techniques that online learners can use to help organize and remember some of the key concepts introduced in the courses. I will share my thoughts on two tools that I've been using. I would love to hear what you all are using.

In true teacher fashion right before a big trip with students, I could not sleep. I kept thinking about what I hope my students will get out of this service immersion trip. I truly hope they learn more about themselves, their country, and the struggles those who live on the margins of society face on a daily basis.

Three years ago I had the amazing privilege of joining Facing History and Ourselves as they developed their Digital Media Innovation Network (DMIN). Through this small group of educators and Facing History staff, I have learned about and challenged myself with using digital media and technology to not only engage students and deepen their learning, but more importantly to encourage them to use technology to give voice to the voiceless in our society.

This week we are featuring a blog post from our "sister" blog, the  Learn + Teach + Share. This was originally posted there on May 29, 2013.

This post, by educator Michael Grover, appeared originally on our sister blog, Facing Canada.