IWitness Adds Eyewitnesses

Over 70 new testimonies have been added to IWitness to increase the scope of experiences students can engage with. IWitness now features 1,321 video testimonies from the Visual History Archive that allows teachers and their students to search, watch, and learn directly from the eyewitness to history. IWitness activities allow students to construct multimedia projects that integrate testimony clips together with footage from other sources, as well as photographs and maps, voiceover audio, music and text.

The first foreign language testimonies have also recently been added into IWitness. Testimonies in French, Polish, Hungarian and Czech have been added and liaisons and teachers in those countries are now building activities to expose their students to IWitness activities in their own language. 

Currently there are 13 activities in IWitness, including the IWitness Video Challenge and The Power of Words. Six additional activities are slated to launch this summer before the start of the 2013/2014 school year. Among the six will be the first activity built on the inclusion of testimony from the 1994 Rwandan Tutsi Genocide - Information Quest: Freddy Mutanguha. This Information Quest will require students to view a selected experience from Mutanguha’s testimony to create a word cloud that will reflect on how they perceive his story. Mutanguha is Country Director of Aegis in Rwanda. Mutanguha is a graduate of the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology and survived the 1994 genocide as a teenager, losing his parents and four sisters. As an orphan head of house, he worked his way through school to become one of the leading advocates for peace and human rights education inspiring the next generation of Rwandans to create a more stable future. He gave his testimony to the USC Shoah Foundation in 2011. Part of his work at Aegis Trust is to facilitate the Rwanda Archive and Education Program, a landmark initiative USC Shoah Foundation is doing in partnership with Aegis Trust at the Kigali Genocide Memorial that aspires to record and preserve approximately 500 Rwandan testimonies as an education resource for the entire world.