It all started with a simple idea of using Google Earth in the classroom. My initial desire in using geo-spatial technologies in the classroom started while student-teaching back in 2005. As a geography major, I had taken a course using ESRI’s ArcMap. I am a huge fan of GIS and currently use QGIS and ArcGIS Online. Both are great technologies for creating, observing, and analyzing spatial distributions. However, there is something about Google Earth that captures the imagination and fosters a greater sense of engagement for myself and others. This imagination and engagement created via Google Earth was what I wanted to package and deliver to my 9th grade students. That packaging of content, pedagogy, and technology eventually became the driving force for geteach.com. Later in my career, and at graduate school, I discovered many educators strive for this same balanced mixture of content, pedagogy, and technology. It even has a framework(see TPACK)

(image above: Reproduced by permission of the publisher, © 2012 by tpack.org)

My issues in 2006 are as follows: I knew nothing about Google Earth; other than how to navigate to my house. I was a new teacher and knew little about good pedagogy. I had acceptable to great geographic content knowledge, but little experience with what content was required and applicable for a Texas high school student. However, the largest hurdle, by far, was my lack of training in using technology in the classroom. After two years, thanks to some awesome mentors, my geography pedagogy and geography content knowledge greatly expanded, but my technological knowledge was still weak to non-existent. That started to change in the summer of 2008. That is the summer I learned my first bit of html code.

<table>
<tr>
<td>Country:</td>
<td>United States</td>
</tr>
</table>

That code created this table

One of my favorite professors, Brock Brown, taught me that, “Geography is a perspective! The geographical perspective provides a broadly applicable, interdisciplinary method of observing and analyzing anything across Earth’s space.” Geography was teaching me how to code. Instead of observing and analyzing distributions across Earth’s space, I was observing and analyzing distributions of html tags from websites. Later in that summer of 2008, I applied that same reasoning to kml (the markup language/code used by Google Earth). I spent most of the 2008-2009 school year creating simple webpages and Google Earth files for my students via notepad++. I also spent an obscene amount of time searching the internet for any Google Earth files to bring into the classroom.

(image above: Early version of geteach.com – the entire layout uses tables with the width set at 998px for use with projector. Round corners/glossy colors where in then.)

By the 2009-2010 school year, my content, pedagogy, and technical knowledge were at the point where I was able to integrate Google Earth in the classroom. At first I adapted lessons that I had already taught for years into Google Earth lessons. These included lessons on climate and levels of development. As the lessons progressed, I desired a more streamline process to create and share Google Earth files with the 25 – 30 students in each class. This was long before (in technology years) we had Google Apps for EDU in our district. In the 2009-2010 school year, while searching for an easy way to share kml files, I stumbled upon the last two pieces to geteach.com: a shapefile to kml converter and the Google Earth API/plugin. With my kindergarten knowledge of html, ArcMap, KML, css, and javascript, I created the first html sketch up page for what is now geteach.com and shared it with my father. My father, an electrical engineer, initially could not understand why students needed two Google Earth globes showing different spatial layers, but began teaching, cleaning, and improving my code to the point where the students could start using geteach.com in the classroom. To this day, our workflow is the same…I find problems, I will then code a solution, take it to my father, and he cleans its up; making sure the code is future proof.

(image above: Later version of geteach.com – this layout adjusts with width of the page…no more round corners, but still sports the gloss)

Without a doubt, my most memorable moment in teaching was the first time students used geteach.com. On average, I probably only slept three hours a night in the 2010-2011 school year. I spent the days at work building my content and pedagogical knowledge and the nights learning and coding geteach.com. So, I went through the roof when I witnessed students using and enjoying what their teacher created for them. Even to this day, I get excited when I see my students, or hear of other teacher’s students success in using geteach.com. My greatest achievement with geteach.com so far was when my 10 year daughter came home and said she used my site in her classroom to explore population density.

In December of 2011, Google Earth Blog (link) wrote its first piece on geteach.com. A couple of months later I reached out to Richard Byrne’s Free Technology for Teachers and he wrote his first blog post (link) on geteach.com. Also, in 2012 geteach.com received an Excellence in Media award from the National Council for Geographic Education. And then in the summer of 2013 I was invited to present geteach.com to Google’s Geo Teacher’s Institute (GTI). 2012 through the middle of 2014 was an awesome time for geteach.com; students were creating and using their kmls in the site, students all over the world were using the site, and teachers from all over the world were contacting me about how they were using geteach.com.

However, in 2014 rumors began to swirl that the Google Earth API used by geteach.com was being deprecated (retired) and in December 2014 the official announcement was made by Google on discontinuing the Google Earth API (Please note: this is only the web version of Google Earth NOT Google Earth). After December 2015 the Google Earth version of geteach.com was not going to work. Therefore, in the summer of 2014 I redesigned geteach.com, this time with some knowledge of what I was doing, using the Google Maps API and hosting the spatial data on Google’s Map Engine platform. While the Maps API is lacking some features found in the Earth API, the new version does have some serious advantages. The first, and largest advantage, is that it works on Chromebooks; which were taking off in 2014 and still used in many schools. Plus, the Maps API works with ipads, though mobile safari is a css nightmare, so I do not design for ipads (I am happy if it works in ios ecosystem, but do not go out of my way to make sure of it). In addition, the Maps API is much easier to use and design other page elements around.

(image above: Last Google Earth version of geteach.com/v5.html – Finally got the layout nailed and can switch between one an two Earth’s without linking to two pages. This page still works if you can find a browser that supports the Earth API)

Funny thing happened in December 2015…the Google Earth API was not officially turned off and Google sent another technology through its deprecation process. This time was actually a bigger blow for geteach.com. The Google Maps Engine platform that was storing all the spatial data (raster and vector). The platform that seamlessly hooked into the Google Maps API used by geteach.com was now being discontinued. This was a much larger issue to geteach.com because I had to learn new methods to host and serve raster and vector files. In other words, Google was discontinuing the way I used to put content (over 120 maps) into geteach.com. Over the life of geteach.com the content has moved from all kml files -> Google Maps Engine Files (which could host and serve both rasters and vectors) -> to me creating and hosting raster data using GDAL and Google Cloud Storage and creating and hosting vector data through styled geojson files. Sorry about the geeky/techy language here, but keep in mind, I had to learn all these technologies to keep geteach.com going.

(image above: Current, but odds are not the last, version of geteach.com)

In January 2016, the latest version of geteach.com came online and where today’s story will end. While the mission of geteach.com has always been the same, a “Free site dedicated to help teachers educate and engage students using Google Geo Services,” the rewards are not measurable. I have seen my students benefit from using all the geo-spatial technologies developed over the past decade, I have had countless complements from other teachers using the website, but most of all, I have grown as an educator in my content, pedagogy, and technical knowledge. All because of a project that got away from me.