Editing NorthStar Through the Ages (section)

== The Early Age: Academic History ==
[[File:NSA Staff 2.png|none|thumb|671x671px|''NSA staff at a conference in 2007'']]
Before the fancy days of Buzz and Microsoft Teams, NorthStar, like every online school, went through a rather medieval era. NorthStar was actually the very first online Christian school to be accredited, and it started out tiny, only consisting of FirstClass and Skype. Back then, NSA followed a traditional school year schedule with a dedicated summer break instead of the flexible 6-month semester allotments like we do now. 

One of NorthStar’s teachers, Mrs. Cox, said that one thing that was a big issue was the file sizes. She said that many “students had limited internet and therefore needed to download lessons in order to work offline. We compiled a Resource CD which contained copies of larger files that were needed for classes. This was sent to the students with whatever books/resources they ordered”…like I said, it was medieval. On FirstClass, teachers and faculty experimented with due dates and late penalties but found it was rather complicated and many of the students required more of the flexibility that came without those things. But as far as academics go, FirstClass served its purpose well. Mrs. Cox said, “We used FirstClass for a long time and it was all-inclusive.”

In 2011, NSA made the switch from FirstClass to a program called BrainHoney. Riley, an NSA alumni said, “Imagine Brainhoney as an old version of Buzz. Submitting assignments worked like Buzz, but there was no autosave. Tests were like Buzz too, but again there was no auto save.” He also said that a “major difference is the interface where you would see weekly assignments. They looked like folders on a computer.” There were even discussion boards like Buzz has, just formatted differently.