On Twitter, I describe myself this way: “Educator. Learner. I strive to learn & find/create ways for others to learn, so they can create ways for others to learn, and so on… My views are my own.”

Wednesday I will present a webinar about digital storytelling for ISTE. This webinar brings together more than a few of my roles as an educator and learner who shares ways for others to teach and learn. My webinar will focus on IWitness, a web resource that allows students to make connections with video testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation.

I used to work at the Shoah Foundation. In fact, I wrote some of the activities on IWitness. But I’m not presenting my webinar because of my relationship with the foundation. I am presenting it because I see students on IWitness in the year 2013 feeling a sense of connection with people who told their stories in the 1990s about events that happened in the 1940s and feeling moved to make a difference in years that still only exist on future calendars. You see, IWitness provides a searchable collection of more than 1,000 video testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses, along with educational tools and supporting resources that provide context. The elements embedded in IWitness do what the best tools of digital storytelling can do: they advance the mission of the foundation to help overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry — and the suffering they cause — through the educational use of stories.

It can be hard to imagine, and challenging to describe, until you use IWitness, which is available at no charge to educators. But if you attend my webinar, I hope it will become clear how you can integrate IWitness into powerful lessons about history, reading, writing, the arts, information literacy, tolerance, and more.