Google Maps Street View imagery just keeps getting better. Recently, Google introduced Google Maps Views which is a collection of the galleries of the best Street View imagery. One the galleries featured this week is Zoos and Animal Parks. In Zoos and Animal Parks you’ll find imagery from places like the San Diego Zoo and the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding. Pan and zoom through the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in the imagery below.

Applications for Education
From the first day that Street View was available I have thought that using Google Maps and Google Earth is an awesome way for students to explore the world in ways that they never could with paper maps. Much like reading travel stories could inspire a student to see the world, exploring Street View imagery through Google Maps Views could inspire a student to travel too.

Keeping with the travel theme, one of the ways that I used Google Maps a few years ago was to have students create their own fictional travel narratives based on places that they explored in Google Maps. They wrote their stories in placemarks on Google Maps. Each placemark in their stories had to include a piece of factual information about the location and then they had the flexibility to write about what they did in their “dream trips” to those places.