Reading, Like a Brick, Forms Strong Foundation

"Ketelle likes the different. The unconventional. The fun. Her weekly vocabulary quizzes for juniors are sprinkled with puns.

'No. 2,' she says during a recent quiz, 'Bondage. Let's put a bondage on your cut.'

Students, who respond with gentle laughter, must define the word and use it in a sentence, the funnier the better. 'You get 1 point extra credit if the sentence makes me laugh,' she reminds the class.

Brandi Bolden, 16, says students appreciate the fun quotient.

'I used to dread doing vocabulary,' Brandi says. 'But she's found a way to make it into a game.'

But don't mistake fun for easy. Ketelle is known for her academic rigor and concedes she occasionally drives her kids with her demands for improving reading and writing and her tough grading.

'Learning and fun are not mutually exclusive,' Ketelle says. 'The ultimate learning experience is that learning is fun in some way, that there's something you're exploring that is exciting your mind.' " [USA Today]

And as we'll show at the TechSource Gaming Symposium in July, games in education and libraries can indeed be fun and still have academic rigor on many levels. We may not have originally thought of what Ketelle is doing as "gaming," but clearly at least one student considers it a game.