Fifty-eight people registered for my blog yesterday. You don’t have to register to read the blog, but you do have to have an account in order to post comments. Mostly, I do that to keep people from anonymously posting inappropriate material. It also helps to keep the comment spam to a minimum.

Considering that I haven’t had 58 people register for my blog ever, yesterday’s activity came as a bit of a surprise. At first, I thought there was some bot out there on the ‘net creating all of these accounts in order to start a spam attack. After a few minutes, though, I noticed a pattern. These are all students. A quick check confirmed my suspicions. They’re all seventh graders, and they’re all in Mrs. Hubert’s computer class. She’s starting off the year teaching them about blogs. Good for her.

So now, we have all of these students with registered accounts. So they can all comment here, if they have something to say. What if I ask a question? Will they respond? Let’s try:

It’s very easy to find things online now. A quick Google search will turn up a wealth of information on just about any topic. Because it’s easy to post information online, though, we can’t always be sure that the things we’re reading online are accurate, complete, balanced, or reliable. As a member of this plugged-in, digital generation, what strategies do you use to determine whether something you read online is reliable information?

If you’re in Mrs. Hubert’s class, feel free to jump in with a comment. Just remember that anyone can read what you write. If you’re not in Mrs. Hubert’s class, you can chime in, too.