Teacher & Student Resources

Welcome to Basecamp! ✨

Whether you’re using Basecamp as a teacher or a student, this resource page will help you learn how to optimize your Basecamp 4 account for your classroom work.

First things first

If you’re a teacher, your students won’t need to sign up for a new Basecamp account to access yours — you’d just add them to your account. When you add a student, they’ll receive an email invitation containing a unique link to set up their free user account to access your Basecamp account. 

Here are two ways to add your students:

• Add them directly from the Project
• Add them from Adminland - you’d use this option if your project(s) haven’t been set up yet or if you’d be adding students to several projects at a time.

If you’re a student and only need access to your teacher’s Basecamp account, you won’t need to create your own — your teacher will just add you to theirs. When you've been added, you'll receive an email containing a unique link inviting you to set up a user account. After that's been set up, you'd have access to your teacher’s account right away. User accounts are always free.

If you’re a student wanting to use Basecamp to manage your own school projects (not connected to a specific teacher) — you’d want to go ahead and create your own account. After you've signed up for your new Basecamp account, email us from your school account with the name of your school, what you're studying, and when you expect to graduate. The 100% education discount will be applied after we’ve verified everything.

Projects

When you're working alone, try using one to start for all classes, consider one to-do list per class. If you find that you need to expand beyond that project, use the moving and copying option to move any items over to a new project. 

You could also try one Basecamp project per course. It gives you plenty of room to collaborate with others.

To-Dos for assignments

• Big assignment coming up? Use To-Do Groups to color-code and divide an assignment into digestible parts
• Use emojis & color to indicate priority or urgency. You can pull up the emoji picker and choose whichever ones suit you and your work best. 💥🚨🟡🔺🔸🔹🟩

• For teachers, each to-do list could be based on each student and the assignments they're required to submit:

  

• Keep in mind that anyone assigned will get a reminder notification at 9:00 AM the day before the due date and again at 9:00 AM on the day it’s due.

Hill Charts for course progression

A Hill Chart is excellent when you need to measure your progression beyond a task marked as done or not. To-dos don’t show what’s unknown and where things are getting stuck.

Before someone can complete a task they first have to figure out how to do it. There’s an “uphill” phase where they learn what’s possible and try out different approaches before settling on the right direction.

Once work is “over the hill,” you can count on it happening. The unknowns are gone and estimates become believable.

Here's more on how to add a to-do list to a Hill Chart.

A project for oneself

When you create a project there won't be anyone else on it by default. The only way a person would know about the recently-created project is if they were an account owner and that account owner decided to look up projects they're not a part of.

You can always see who is on a project at the top on the project's main page:

And you can always see who is an owner in Adminland:

My Stuff

My Assignments gathers all to-dos assigned to you across the entire Basecamp account. You'll see everything assigned to you, assignments with dates, and to-dos that you've assigned.

This report could be emailed every Monday morning:

My Schedule is another great roundup of any and all events you're a part of on the account. It'll also show dated to-dos that are assigned to you in this one spot. You can even subscribe to this particular schedule:

Boosts as votes

When you're working with others, sometimes you need a quick opinion instead of a bunch of comments. Boosts are perfect! At the bottom of your Basecamp Doc or your Message Board post, include something like this:

Students as employees or collaborators? Or clients?

Most teachers add students to their education accounts as employees or collaborators, but some prefer to add them as clients. The differences between the two are listed out here.

Added someone as a client but they should be a collaborator? Maybe the reverse? Here’s how you can quickly change their user access. 

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