The oral-history project StoryCorps garnered more than 49,000 interviews with its Great Thanksgiving Listen initiative, almost doubling the number of interviews it’s gathered since its 2003 launch.
The Great Thanksgiving Listen encouraged high-school students to interview older relatives over the holiday weekend using the StoryCorps app. The project got a boost after it was featured on the Google homepage with a short animation.
“We have been so moved and inspired here at StoryCorps to listen to the waves of stories coming in from across the country,” StoryCorps founder Dave Isay said in a statement. “We are enormously grateful to teachers for embracing the assignment, to students for their extraordinary recordings, and to grandparents and other interviewees for bringing this historic undertaking to life.”
A toolkit for teachers to help students participate in the Great Thanksgiving Listen reached 23,000 downloads. StoryCorps launched its app in March, and it has since been used to record more than 65,000 interviews and has been downloaded more than 500,000 times.
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