Grok Bot and Basecamp are a great pairing for tracking homework, missing assignments, grades, and projects with your kids. Grok Bot can become a personal learning assistant.
Get Basecamp Going
Grab your free account from Basecamp and start with your one free project. With the free account you can add up to five users. Create one for yourself and one for Grok Bot. This is an opportunity to name your bot something fun that your kids will like. Add your kids' accounts as well. You will need an email address for all users, including the bot. I used an old icloud.com email that I had lying around for the bot. If you are homeschooling, you even grab a full Basecamp account for free! This account is normally thousands of dollars a year to buy, so it's worth grabbing if you are truely using it for educational purposes only. Once you have your account, just email Basecamp explaining that you are homeschooling. They might have some followup questions to verify that you are legit, but it's a fairly fast process, and worth it!
Get Grok Bot Going
I suggest utilizing a dedicated bot to interface with Basecamp and your other education accounts.
- Tell Grok Bot to connect to Basecamp via the CLI. It'll need your help with a username and password. Use the account that you already created for the bot. Use the CLI so Grok Bot doesn't have to log in with the browser. The CLI (Command Line Interface) will be faster and will be a more efficient use of AI tokens.
- Direct Grok Bot to connect to your child's learning portals via your parent login. The parent logins will give Grok Bot access to viewing classes, assignments, grades, and possibly messages from the teacher.
- Direct Grok Bot to message you via Basecamp once a week on Wednesday morning with missing assignements, and low grades. If you want, you can also have Grok Bot message your kids with reminders.
- Direct Grok Bot to message you in Basecamp once a week with upcoming assignments. Again, you can have Grok message your kids if this makes sense for their workflow.
Bonus
- If your kids are receiving messages from Grok Bot, you can also encourage your kids to send messages back to Grok. Since Grok Bot has access to their classes, they can ask questions about what work is upcoming, suggestions for what to study, and more.
- Tell Grok Bot to check for notifications from in Basecamp every 5 minutes between 7am and 9pm. Even though it's checking so often, it actually doesn't take many tokens. If you are ambitious, you could set up webhooks for notifications, which would be even more efficient and could be more instantanious, but I haven't figured out that one yet.
- You can use Grok Bot to help organize assignments as To-Do lists in Basecamp, download assignment packets, and other attachments that the teacher has posted.
If you set up something like this, I'd love to hear from you.