1. Introduction
The attributes of openness, collaboration, and user-generated content, combined with social media’s immense popularity among students, have made applications like Facebook and Twitter attractive to college instructors (Cain & Fox, 2009). Social media offers the additional advantages of an informal, mobile setting, and less rigid time constraints as class discussions can be held outside of regular class times (Cain & Policastri, 2011). Social media technology has appeared as a fairly recent tool that offers new educational possibilities, many of them still to be discovered, but it also generates new perils. Last April, the New York City Education Department released its first list of guidelines governing the use of social media by employees, reflecting a growing concern about the ease with which teachers can interact electronically with students, and the potential for misuse or abuse. The guidelines recognize that social media technology can serve as a powerful tool with regard to enhancing education, communication and learning, but recommends that teachers maintain separate professional and personal web pages (NYC Department of Education, 2012). In recent years, dozens of teachers have been investigated and some have been fired for inappropriate interactions and relationships with students that began or were conducted on social media websites