U089 – [Planner / Mind Map] My edits aren't visible to my students

You're editing a widget and everything looks nice in Preview mode, but when you share the widget with your students, it turns out your edits aren't visible to them. What's going on?

In short

The behaviour can be summed up in the following key points:

If you click Preview from within the widget editor, you view the widget as if you were a student.
If you are a student, then any answers you fill in or edits you make to a widget are private and not visible to other students.

In detail

When you are in the widget editor of any widget and click Preview, you are viewing the widget as if you were a student. You can answer your own questions and discover how dropdowns, combining questions, drag-and-drop and all other types of questions work in BookWidgets. That way, you can get a perfect feel for how your widget works, and consequently be able to assist your students in case it isn't intuitively clear to them how to proceed or how to work with the widget.

If a student fills in a widget, then their answers won't be visible on the screens of fellow classmates. In exactly the same way, the answers you fill in in Preview mode aren't visible to ("fellow") classmates either. If you want to erase the answers that you yourself have filled in, click the trashcan icon in the top-right corner of your Preview. The slate will be wiped clean, and the widget will be reset. This is the view your students will see when they open your widget for the first time.

While this behaviour applies to all widgets, it is more intuitive to some widget types than to others, notably the Planner and Mindmap widgets. Always keep in mind that when you edit a widget in Preview mode, you are doing so as if you were a student. And just like Quiz answers aren't visible to fellow students, Planner / Mindmap edits aren't either. This means that if you, as a teacher, want to edit your actual widget and not just your own, personal student view of it, you must always do so from within the widget editor window and not the Preview mode.

If you want to know what a widget will look like to your students when they open it, always click the trashcan icon in the top-right.