ABC Cemetery - Bedford VA

I visited the “ABC” cemetery in Bedford VA for the first time on March 29^th 2014. For those of you who do not know what the ABC cemetery is I will give you a little background information. The ABC cemetery is located at Antioch Baptist Church. When you first take a look at the property the church as well as the cemetery look normal. I am used to seeing cemeteries in churches so at first I did not really see what was so special about the cemetery. That was until I took a look up close at the headstones.

Upon walking up close to the headstones, I started to notice a pattern. All of the headstones were in order by last name. As I walked down the different rows of the headstones I noticed that every row was ordered in the same manner. Upon research I found out that this was because of the original care-taker of the cemetery, Mr. Thomas Aadland.

Mr. Aadland had a very OCD mindset and carried this into his line of work as care-taker of the cemetery. Mr. Aadland would arrange all of the graves and headstones to keep the cemetery organized in alphabetical order. Aadland was able to accomplish this by having families sign a document stating that he was able to move the graves around. When I went to the cemetery I was surprised at how big the cemetery actually was. In being so big that means that all of those families signed the waiver. When seeing this it made me think about if I would want my family to sign a document like this if I passed away. I don’t know if I would want to be exhumed and moved around all of the time like these graves were.

When Aadland was coming close to his death in 1992 he came to the realization that there would not be anyone to move all of the graves around to place his grave in the correct order. With his last name starting with an A, a lot of graves would have to be dug up and moved around to keep everything in order. Aadland had to come up with some way of keeping his cemetery in order. Due to this Aadland came up with the idea of changing his name. In changing his name from Thomas Aadland to Thomas Zuckerman, he would now be at the end of the grave sites and no extra moving around would be required.

Traveling to this cemetery made me realize all of the cool things there really are in and around Lynchburg to do. I definitely have never heard of the idea of an alphabetical gravesite before and really makes Lynchburg special and an interesting place to visit and live.

Click. Click. Click.

Clickers are used in a lot of classes here where I attend school at Liberty University. They are used to take attendance or to take quizzes and sometimes even tests. For the clicker project, I had a chance to be on the other side of clickers. I had a chance to make the questions for the PowerPoint. The concept was very simple and easy to figure out. The only thing that was slightly annoying was the fact that you had to open turning technologies before you open PowerPoint. The first time that I tried to create a quiz I forgot to do this. Other than that though, this project was very easy, and I think teachers should use them more.

Screenr

For so long I have always wondered how people created YouTube videos that were recording what they were doing on their computer. They were able to navigate on their screen and vocally talk about what they were doing. This process can be done using a program called screenr. Screenr is a free program that is so simple to use. For this simplicity, I really did not mind this assignment. The hardest part of this assignment was simply to decide what I wanted to record about. After that you simply navigate on your computer with the application running. This assignment taught me a lot about video capture and how I could flip my classroom if I ever would want to in my classroom someday.

Animals.Animals.Animals

All animals are classifying into different kingdoms and classes based upon their characteristics. We for example as humans are classified first under the mammal class and then under the Vertebrates class. This concept is a lesson that is typically taught during a 5th grade school year. This is the concept that I created my interactive webquest on. I believe that the idea and concept of webquest is a very useful tool for teachers. I greatly enjoyed navigating around the zunal webquest maker and seeing all that can be done within a webquest to make a lesson plan more interactive. This is a tool that I will keep in mind when I am a teacher.

Smartboard Lesson

In high school, I was presented with the use of smart boards in my classes. My high school was blessed to have the funds to have a smart board in most of the class rooms. Often, along with the smart boards came teachers who did not really know how to use them. Or they would know how to use them, but not to the ability that they could. This made me doubt why we really needed to be paying all that money for technology that is not being used.

My senior year of high school, I had an internship in a kindergarten classroom. Every day after lunch, I would go and I would spend the afternoon in Mrs. Hill's classroom. Mrs. Hill had a smart board in her room that she used every day. No matter what the lesson was that she was teaching she always had some interactive game or story on the smart board to go with it. Also during choice time, the students would get to choose the smart board as an activity to play with. During this experience I learned that smart boards, if known how to be used properly can really enhance learning.

During my Education 240 class I had a chance to experience smart boards on the flip side of the equation. I was no longer the one being taught but now actually doing the teaching. I greatly enjoyed being able to look at all of the different things that smart notebook and exchange had to offer. After looking through different websites, I found Gynzy.com. Gynzy is a great website that has tons of interactive games and tools to use while teaching with a smart board. On this website I found a math game involving money that would be perfect for learning how to properly pay for things.

I am glad that I learned the further knowledge of smart boards on the teaching side of things and learned all of the different ways that I can incorporate smart boards into my lessons daily when I am a teacher. This project also will be very helpful when I go on to do my lessons in my other education classes.