In September Google added 10,000 indoor maps to Google Maps for Android. This week Google added those same indoor maps to the Google Maps that you use on your desktop. To view the indoor maps select a building and zoom in until the floor plan appears.  Click here for the list of all of the places for which Google Maps has indoor floor plans.

Applications for Education
The Google Maps indoor maps are not Street View maps, but they could still be useful for some teachers and students. You could use the indoor maps for field trip planning. The indoor maps could also be useful if you have your students writing travel narratives about places that they haven’t been to. For example, a few years back one of my colleagues and I had students write fictitious travel narratives about places that they had studied during our geography unit. Students had to research places in a city and write a short narrative about visiting those places. The indoor floor plans could provide students with some more details to add to those narratives.