Grade Level: Secondary Social Studies, Language Arts, or Video Journalism students

The project will use materials from the Library of Congress American Folklife Center. There is a project kit at this site.

There is a national project to collect interviews from Veterans from any war. We are emphasizing WWII Veterans because about 1,500 die each day and their stories are lost.

There will be at least 2 connections. The connections can be either multipoint or point to point.

The first connection will introduce the project and the classes to each other. The hosting class will have a WWII veteran participating in the video conference and classes will first watch some clips of interviews and then take turns asking the veteran questions from the suggested questions provided by the Library of Congress.

There are sample video clips at http://www.loc.gov/folklife/vets/ and at http://oralhistory.minds.tv/

Students from participating classes will divide into teams. Each team will videotape at least one interview.

In the second connection teams from the participating schools will share short clips from the most interesting part of the interviews they collected, giving background information about the veteran. Each team will share their impressions and will answer questions from the other schools. There may need to be follow up connections, based on the number of interviews collected and number of participating schools. If any pictures are taken of memorabilia, the pictures will be shared using the document camera.

Interview tapes will be sent to the Library of Congress at the conclusion of the connections to be part of the collection.

Teachers interested in participating can contact Melissa Higgs-Horwell, melissah@scoca-k12.org, 800-634-8828.