I’m working as a mentor in several ISTE Institute sessions this year and one of the participant’s comments took me back several years to my first experience using online discussion forums with students. She was describing an idea for a student activity and my first thought was that it would be great to have the students interact in a forum setting about the work they were doing. My second thought was that there is no way for this individual teacher to set up her own server running Moodle to create an online course. Blackboard? Forget about it.

It’s easy to forget that even open source software like Moodle has costs associated with it. Not every teacher has a spare server or knowledge of configuring server software, much less a supportive tech department that encourages creativity and innovation. (Don’t get me started on that one.) What if there was a free service on the Internet that let teachers create online courses that could be used to post links, share documents, and host discussions?

That rather long intro brings me to the Internet Classroom Assistant. If you’d like to experiment with adding online components to your face-to-face classes, the ICA might be just what you’ve been looking for. The site has been around since 1998 and I think I used it with my high school physics class around 2000. It’s not fancy, but it’s free, simple, fast, and has no ads. Read about their philosophy and some of the ICA features. Does it do everything Moodle does? Not even close. Does that matter? Not for someone who wants to dip their toes into the online learning world and see how they like it.