Connecting with students or not so much

My daughter and I each got a new cell phones a few weeks ago and she figured hers out right away. Her fingers were flying on that mini keypad texting here and there. Slowly, I am still discovering new features of my phone. Oddly, strange apps pop up unexpectedly which I can't seem to delete or let alone use. I guess I am not as e-connected as the younger generation and I'm not sure I want to be.

Here's an interesting and disturbing article which I think we'll be running into more and more as our online social networking personas seem to clash with our professional lives. http://educationtechnews.com/innocent-texting-with-student-gets-teacher-suspended/. This teacher was suspended and on his was to being fired for texting a student.

What about you? Do you text, have a FaceBook page, a LinkedIn page, a Twitter account? Do you communicate with your students using any of these mediums? In your opinion, is this appropriate? We are finding that more students are not using email to communicate personally and otherwise. Is texting our students the next step? How about teaching a class through FaceBook? Will we lose our professionalism or control of our class?

I do have a FaceBook page but chose to use my maiden name to set it up specifically so that none of my students would be able to find me. I never thought, however, that two old boyfriends would be trolling through FaceBook and contact me after a couple of decades! Boy was I stunned!