Hi Beth,
perhaps I can answer your questions.
When you go to your lesson-list, you can open your lesson in “Edit-view” by clicking on “Edit”.
Now you can choose from the right column if you want to do a “private sharing”, i.e. if you want to use this lesson only in a course, or if you want to do a “public sharing”, i.e. you want to share this lesson with courses AND communities.
After you decided what to do, you now can choose the courses and/or the communities to share the lesson with. You may choose from the communities you joined and/or the courses you created.
Now you decide about the way you want your work be copyrighted by choosing the option that seems to fit best for you.
At last you now choose how to publish your lesson:
If you choose “Publish”-No, which is chosen by default, your lesson will stay private!
You will have to click the “Publish – Yes”-radiobutton to actually publish your lesson!
Hope this helped.