My Google Map Blog

A handful of cities in Louisiana were updated with fresh Street View imagery today. New Orleans was the big one, with a remarkable amount of fresh imagery, and Google updated Baton Rouge and Lafayette as well.

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu wrote a blog entry for Google's Lat Long Blog, in which he details some of the great places you can see in this fresh imagery. The imagery is indeed quite sharp, and it's a great way to show off the progress that New Orleans has made in the seven years since Hurricane Katrina.

Don't forget that not only can view this imagery in Google Maps, but you can view it inside of Google Earth as well. Here's a quick video that shows more about how that works:

As Google Earth has continued to expand to a larger audience over the years, along with the ever-increasing resolution of their imagery, we're finding more and more cases of people (typically researchers and professors) making great discoveries using the product. We seen the discovery of animal-shaped mounds in Peru and meteor craters in the Saharan Desert and Australia, among others.

Now satellite archaeology researcher Angela Micol of Maiden, North Carolina has possibly discovered a few new pyramid complexes in Egypt.

The formation of the shapes at the site are quite similar to the alignment of the Giza pyramids, which adds to the hope that these may indeed be pyramids.

The next move is to have some on-site investigation performed to try to determine for sure whether these are truly pyramids or not. Specifically, Angela said:

"The images speak for themselves. It's very obvious what the sites may contain but field research is needed to verify they are, in fact, pyramids and evidence should be gathered to determine their origins. It is my hunch there is much more to these sites and with the use of Infrared imagery, we can see the extent of the proposed complexes in greater detail."

You can learn more about these findings from this post on the Archaeology News Network site.

Many people are gearing up the end of summer break and the start of school. In fact, our daughters just left for their first day of the school year, as have thousands of others from Kindergarten to College.

Google Earth is not only a great tool for geography - it is a tool for tying all kinds of information to location. When you first load GE you have a wealth of information available at your fingertips. Thousands of aerial and satellite photos, dozens of layers of information: city names, country borders, airport locations, road maps, National Geographic content, volcanoes, and more. Since Google Earth is an intuitive and fun tool, I believe you could use it as a visualization and educational tool for almost any subject. Once students prepare their own content, GE can be used to present their work - or even share their work with the world.

You can even use Google Earth to see places quoted in Shakespeare or the path of Lewis and Clark:

For other great uses of Google Earth in the classroom, check out this post from Frank a few years ago, or the great list of ideas from Lucas Van de paer.

If you're heading off to a new university this fall, you can check to see if Google has released Street View imagery for that school yet so you can explore the campus. The Official Google Blog has a list of other great ways to use Google products to help with your studies this year.

If you're heading back to school soon, we wish you great success in the upcoming year!