Publishing Dashboards

Building a dashboard doesn’t put it in front of anyone. Publishing is the separate step that decides where it shows up and who sees it there.

Open a dashboard and click Publish. The page lists the places this dashboard is already published to, and Publish somewhere underneath adds another.

The four kinds of place

A dashboard can be in several places at once, including several of the same kind: two School places reaching two different sets of schools, or two Student places reaching two groups of students. One dashboard serves district leaders and teachers without being copied, and two people can each add a place of their own to it.

The menu lists all four kinds whether or not this dashboard can use them. One it can’t is greyed out and says why.

Narrowing where it reaches

A place with nothing named reaches everywhere at that level: every school, every class. To send it somewhere more specific, name what it should reach.

• Schools, on School and Class. The list offers the schools you administer, so a building leader picks from their own schools and a district leader from all of them.
• Courses and Classes, on Class. The class list is scoped the same way as schools: you see the classes you can publish to, which for a teacher is the ones they teach.

A teacher is offered the class list alone. A school or a course would describe classes that aren’t theirs, so naming classes is the only narrowing that means anything from where they stand.

A Student place names none of those. It says who it reaches once, as a cohort. See below.

Leaving a list empty means “all of them”. Filling more than one narrows by all of them at once, not any: a Class place naming Lincoln Elementary and Math reaches Math classes at Lincoln, and nothing else. A class has to match every list you’ve filled in.

Student places narrow to particular students, and that cohort is the whole of what they reach, so it’s the full cohort builder, the same one reports use. Say which students in whatever terms suit:

• a class, a course at a school, or a grade,
• a list of students by name,
• a saved cohort someone has already built in Resources, or
• all students, which is only worth choosing with a filter on it.

A teacher is offered two of those: one of their classes, or a list of names. The rest describe students past the classroom they stand in, so they would only be refused when saved.

Any of those can then be filtered: by demographics, or by performance on a question, an assessment, a standard or a report card column. A filter is on offer to everyone, and narrows whichever starting point you chose.

A dashboard whose reports ask for a class is listed once per class the student is in, named for each, because that’s what decides the data it shows. One that asks for no class is listed once. Which class put the dashboard in front of a student isn’t something the cohort can say, since it may be a list of names or a filter over scores, so the listing follows what the reports need instead.

A cohort drawn from a school year is about that year, and the dashboard is listed under it: one published to last year’s fifth graders stays on last year in the student’s term selector rather than appearing again this year. A cohort that names no year, such as a list of students, is listed in every year.

You can publish to students more than once, each time a Student place with a cohort of its own. Two teachers each publishing to their own students is the usual way a dashboard ends up with several.

Only the students they describe see the dashboard on their own page. Leave the cohort unset and it reaches every student, which, like reaching every school, is a district power: a building leader or teacher has to name a cohort, and it has to be one made up of students they could reach anyway.

Why some places are unavailable

A dashboard’s reports can leave parts of themselves to be filled in when the dashboard is viewed: a school, a course, a class, a student. Each place supplies its own scope and everything around it: a class dashboard knows its class, and so also its course, its school and its term. The band at the top of the publishing page names what the reports are asking for:

These reports ask for Student, which limits where it can go.

A place can only host the dashboard if it can supply everything the reports ask for. A report that asks for a student can only go on a student’s page, because nowhere above that knows which student you mean. Places that can’t supply what’s needed are greyed out in the menu and say why:

These reports need a student, which district publishing can’t supply.

If a place you want is unavailable, the fix is in the dashboard rather than on this page: edit the report so it doesn’t ask for that.

Who can publish where

Publishing reaches only as far as you do.

Which row you’re on is decided by the kind of account you have, not by the individual permissions attached to your role. A teacher whose role grants school-level access for reporting still publishes to their own classes.

Reaching everyone is a district power. That’s why the District place needs district catalog access, since a district dashboard reaches the whole district however you describe it, and why a building leader or teacher has to name the schools or classes a place should reach. Leaving those empty would mean all of them, so the page holds Save changes until you’ve named something:

Name the schools or classes this should reach. Reaching all of them is a district power.

Publishing dashboards you didn’t build

You don’t need to be able to edit a dashboard to publish it. If you can open it, you can decide where it appears for the people you’re responsible for. That matters for dashboards shared across districts, which nobody in your district can edit but which you may well want in front of your leaders.

When several people publish the same dashboard

Because more than one person can publish the same dashboard, saving only ever changes your own places. Anything published by someone whose reach differs from yours stays exactly as it was, and the page tells you when that’s the case:

Also published here by someone whose reach differs from yours; saving leaves that alone.

So a teacher adding their class to a dashboard the district publishes won’t disturb the district’s copy, and the district won’t disturb theirs.

The page says that someone else has published here without saying where: a colleague’s class is something you may not have access to, so it’s reported as a count rather than by name.

The same rule works in reverse: you can only remove places you could have created. Unpublish clears yours and leaves everyone else’s standing.

Two people with the same reach, co-teachers of one class say, can each change the other’s places for it, because they have equal say over that class.

Removing a dashboard from somewhere

Use the delete button on that place and save. Removing every place is the same as unpublishing it entirely, as far as your own reach goes: places published by someone whose reach differs from yours stay where they are.

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