GeTeach.com and ArcGIS API
In 2012, I ran into Joseph Kerski in San Marcos at the National Council for Geographic Education conference. The site created for my students, geteach.com, received an Excellence in Media award from the organization that year, and I have a distinct memory of a conversation in a small hotel room with Joseph, where he asked something along the lines of why I don’t use ESRI’s services. The truth is, I am a user and teacher of multiple GIS platforms, including QGIS, ArcGIS Online, Earth Engine, Google Earth, Google Maps, Google My Maps, and the Google Maps API. After several years of delay, I have finally started looking at ArcGIS’s JavaScript API.
What I like..
Please note that I’ve only spent a couple of weekends working on this new draft site: https://geteach.com/arc/. However, I already have some positive first impressions. Since the loss of the Earth API, I’ve dreamed of bringing a globe back into a website. The bonus with the ArcGIS API is that users can toggle between both 2D and 3D views.
I have mixed feelings about widgets, regardless of the service. They’ve always been nice and easy to work with, but there’s always something I’d like to change. While the compromises are minimal with the ArcGIS API, they still exist. From the documentation, it seems that a skilled developer could modify or create their own widgets. However, no high school teacher has time for that
The basemap options are fantastic. Eventually, once I figure it out, I will add the raster pyramid tiles and geoJson vector data I use in geteach.com. Loading the data does not look to be difficult. Like all the version of geteach.com, the menu system is going to take some time. Mashing together an API with a home grown UX takes more time than a couple of weekends for me. The basic UI framework is there. In addition, I have another former function that I would like to bring back to layers that will add some time to my development. Therefore, currently the only exploration of maps are ESRI’s basemaps….which are fantastic! Really enjoy the outline map next to a reference map!
What I miss…
Urgh! Street View. Street View is the primary reason I have not already experimented with the ArcGIS API. I do not believe there is one time when my class is using geteach.com that at least one student is not using Street View. Even if there is nothing in the activity having to do with Street View, someone has dropped Pegman into North Korea.
For this project, there are several widgets, including search, elevation, and measurements, which are easy to implement in the code. The main challenge is understanding how to start, stop, clear, and reset the widgets for both a 2D environment and a 3D world… MapView vs. SceneView.
Similar to Street View, Google’s imagery is far better than the available basemaps—at least the ones I’ve seen—when it comes to populated areas. Cultural landscape is a huge component of my human geography high school course, and Google’s imagery is often more detailed in this regard. ESRI’s services, however, seem to offer more complex 3D scenes, though this is not a default option.
Using an API key is not straightforward. I’m unsure how long this draft site will work because I don’t have a ‘pay as you go’ setup as a developer. One of the reasons I’m branching out to this API is because I had to remove the search location feature from geteach.com. One month, I received a $300 bill from Google’s Map Platform due to their Places API, the service for map search. I avoided the charge by disabling the feature. This is where most of my uncertainty lies—I have no idea how much this API will cost as I continue developing it, nor do I know how long it will work without a key.
As always, the primary purpose of geteach.com is to provide a free site to help teachers educate and engage students using Google Geo Tools—no ads and no sign-in required. I see geteach.com as a gift to the curious who find value in these sites. As I mentioned earlier, I’m a high school teacher, so I apologize that it can’t be more.
Follow me on bluesky @geteach if you are interested in project updates.
updated 12/14/2024 minor edits and replaced “Follow me on Twitter” with Bluesky