Senior Product Manager Katie O’Brien.
Across districts and states, education leaders are asking more specific, more urgent questions about their data. EA’s data visualization product, Podium, helps to answer common questions about topics such as chronic absenteeism, enrollment trends, behavior patterns, and performance. But many of our partners also need additional dashboards tailored to their local context, priorities, and strategies.
With a self-service dashboarding add-on (Podium+), our partners can build those custom dashboards using Podium’s platform and tools; however, there hasn’t been a clear way to share those dashboards broadly with the educators and leaders who need them most, until now.
Today, we’re introducing Embed Studio, a new Podium+ feature that enables partners to publish the dashboards they build directly into the Podium application alongside the EA-managed dashboards. The result? One place to explore both shared and local insights, with the security and governance education agencies expect.
From Shared Questions to Local Insight
Podium was designed around a simple idea: education organizations asking very similar questions, repeatedly. Questions about attendance trends, enrollment changes, assessment results, and outcomes appear across districts and states. By providing a set of standardized dashboards, the EA Core Dashboard Suite helps leaders quickly understand those patterns without recreating reports from scratch. Being able to answer these questions quickly can free up time for more context-specific questions and investigations.
Often, the districts and collaboratives we work with also have questions that are uniquely their own. For example, they may want to track the impact of a specific initiative, explore outcomes for a new program, or examine trends that matter most in their local context.
That’s where Podium+ comes in. Podium+ gives partners the ability to create their own dashboards using the same platform that powers Podium’s core visualizations. These dashboards empower districts, collaboratives, and agencies to explore questions that go beyond the common patterns captured in the core suite.
Until now, sharing those custom dashboards widely within Podium required workarounds or separate tools.
Introducing Embed Studio
Embed Studio closes that gap.
With Embed Studio, administrators can take dashboards created through Podium+ and publish them directly into the Podium interface. Once published, those dashboards appear alongside the EA-managed dashboards users already rely on.
This approach allows partners to bring their own insights into the same environment where educators are already exploring core metrics. Instead of switching between tools or navigating multiple systems, users can access both shared and locally tailored dashboards in one place.
The result is a more cohesive experience for users—and a more flexible platform for partners.
How Embed Studio Works
Embed Studio is designed to make publishing and organizing dashboards straightforward for administrators while maintaining the governance and security standards education agencies require.
Selecting a Dashboard
Administrators can choose from dashboards their organization has created that have not been published into Podium yet. Once selected, the system automatically captures information needed to embed the dashboard and a title for display.
Adding Context for Users
Before publishing, administrators can adjust the display name, assign an icon, and add a description that explains the dashboard’s purpose and provides the viewer with important notes. These descriptions can include helpful context such as definitions, limitations, or key business rules to enable users to better understand what they are seeing.
Defining Access and Visibility
Administrators determine which organizations or districts should view the dashboard and which user roles—such as school-level or district-level users—should have access. Organizations are able to publish to any district for which they have data access. So, districts can only publish dashboards to users in their own district. Collaboratives can share dashboards with any district in their collaborative. This ensures that dashboards appear only for relevant and appropriate users.
Previewing Before Publishing
Dashboards can be previewed before publication to confirm they display correctly and behave as expected. Administrators can also temporarily hide dashboards while testing or troubleshooting.
Organizing Dashboards with Folders
Embed Studio also supports organizing dashboards into folders within the Podium sidebar. Administrators can group related dashboards together and reorder them using drag-and-drop controls, making navigation easier for end users.
Built with Governance in Mind
Education data requires careful handling, and Embed Studio was designed with that responsibility in mind.
Before publishing a dashboard, administrators confirm that descriptions do not include personally identifiable information (PII). The system also checks that the appropriate variables are in place to enforce role-level security. If those requirements are not met, the dashboard will not display properly, preventing accidental exposure of sensitive data.
These safeguards allow partners to expand their use of custom dashboards while maintaining the governance standards expected in education environments.
Expanding Access to Insight
At its core, Embed Studio is about expanding access to insights. The functionality of Embed Studio is widespread, including:
- Allow a small group of dashboard creators to support a much broader audience of educators and leaders.
- Enable collaboratives to share dashboards across districts.
- Keep core and custom dashboards in a single, familiar environment, so users can move from high-level patterns to local context without switching platforms.
When educators can see more of the story in one place, they can act with greater clarity and confidence. That’s the goal behind this release and behind our work more broadly.