Paulin Ndahayo is quickly proving to be one of the newest and most passionate ambassadors of IWitness in Rwanda.

Ndahayo teaches political education and literature at Gashora Girls Academy in the Bugesera district in eastern Rwanda. He attended the first Rwandan IWitness teacher training at Kigali Genocide Memorial Center (KGMC) in November 2013 and, with his colleague Penelope Aryatugumya, will conduct a pilot of his first IWitness lesson at his school this year.

Roseline Twagiramariya, USC Shoah Foundation educational liaison in Rwanda, said Ndahayo has also come back to KGMC to share his lesson plans and learn more about video editing. He will also help with outreach to other teachers and may assist in future IWitness training sessions.

IWitness is USC Shoah Foundation’s award-winning educational website. It contains 1,356 full-length testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and Rwanda Tutsi Genocide. Teachers may register their students for the site and assign interactive activities that allow students to engage deeply with the testimonies. IWitness also includes a built-in video editor for students to create their own video projects using the testimonies.

Ndahayo said he was attracted to IWitness because it makes concepts concrete that would otherwise be difficult to explain or visualize.

“Though we Rwandans understand what genocide is, it is still hard to illustrate the Holocaust and other genocides to young people who are many decades away from those events,” Ndahayo said. “Therefore, I was attracted because IWitness was going to help me teach adequately using testimonies of real people who survived different crimes against humanity.”

He plans to assign his political science students to watch testimonies and answer questions about them; later he will incorporate IWitness into his English literature classes. Ndahayo said IWitness not only “makes the old events real” for students, but it also helps both the teacher and students in Rwanda become familiar with the use of technology in the classroom.

It’s especially important for Rwandan teachers to use IWitness, Ndahayo said.

“Rwandan Genocide is one of the most recent genocides, and because of that, young students are still asking themselves many questions about it,” Ndahayo said.