Google Maps is a versatile tool that I love to show to students and teachers. Over the years I’ve seen great uses of Google Maps in mathematics, science, language arts, and social studies. The Google World Wonders project provides a great place to find Street View imagery of famous natural and man-made landmarks, but it is limited to Street View. The new Google Maps Gallery offers a fantastic collection of maps depicting all kinds of data.

In the Google Maps Gallery you can find mapped displays of data sets on topics in science, society, history, politics, and much more. Unlike the World Wonders Project, the Google Maps Gallery is focused on visualizations of data sets.

Applications for Education
The maps in the Google Maps Gallery could provide the spark for research students’ research projects. After looking at a particular map or set of maps, have your students investigate the causes linked to the data collected and displayed in a map. For example, I might have students look at this map of worldwide Internet use then investigate the causes of the patterns.