Security Breach

As I previously blogged, my primary success using ICT in the classroom has been the sharing and collaboration of all class material; agenda, due dates, links to handouts, etc. I feel rather proud actually, that I have been able to engage at least some students and provide them with easy access to everything they need.

One particular class has been particularly "active" with the classroom document. If you've used google docs before, you may know that when multiple users are viewing the same docs, a chat window can be used along with real-time editing. Anyways, I was at first pleased to see the students, which seems to be well-bonded (not to mention they are the streamed class, aka 'taskies'). They were also adding some year 9 type humour, which I liked. It was like a more informal setting, and being that I'd tried to add a bit informal with what I added so that the students may find it more interesting.

Recently, however, I have been faced with a question: Where does one draw the line of formal/informal in the online classroom forum? The students seem to be getting more informal, with a ______ likes _____ message, which I know all to well to be quite the awkward age for these rumours to get posted for the class to see. The term "duty of care" pops into play here...

On one hand, it's not class time, you're happy to see the kids collaborating, engaged, and quite frankly DOING their homework!
On the other hand, I feel that as a teacher, I work very hard to maintain a professional atmosphere in the classroom (or at least I'm trying to) and I have created an online space to help with their learning... why shouldn't the same rules apply?
I pose this question to you, teacher candidates.
Do you have collaborative places online for your students?
Have you been faced with questionable online behaviour?
How do you maintain professionalism in the online world?